Current Exhibition

Yasumasa Morimura

SELECTED WORKS BY Yasumasa Morimura

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait - After Greta Garbo 1

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Everybody loves a dame. And Morimura just loves to be one! In this series of self-portraits Morimura convincingly slips into the roles of legendary silver screen goddesses, from Audrey Hepburn to Ingrid Bergman (and it doesn't stop there - he's also been art historical icons such as the Mona Lisa and Renoir's busty barmaid!). But Morimura is more than just art's most famous drag queen. Dealing with issues of cultural and sexual appropriation he is constantly exploring ideas of image consumption, identity and desire: Can Brigitte Bardot be as innocently flirtatious with angular Japanese features? Would Marilyn Monroe be as sexy if she was Japanese - and a man? And where does the line lay between Garbo's neurotic reclusivity and the paranoid expression of the down right freaky? In his photos Morimura lives out his impossible dreams of being 'other', playing the role of Asian agent provocateur infiltrating Western collective consciousness: becoming the women most lusted after, making them even more exotic.

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait - After Greta Garbo 2

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait - After Ingrid Bergman

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait - After Marilyn Monroe

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait - After Sylvia Kristel

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait after Brigitte Bardot 1

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 34.5 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait after Liza Minelli 1

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 29 cm

Yasumasa Morimura
Self-Portrait/After Audrey Hepburn 1

1996

gelatin silver prints

44 x 29 cm

ARTICLES

Yasumasa Morimura at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art by Monty DiPietro

"Art is basically entertainment," says Yasumasa Morimura, "Even Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were entertainers. In that way, I am an entertainer and want to make art that is fun."
There is plenty of fun in the 60 photographs, sculptures, videos and "print club" machines that make up Morimura’s "Self-Portrait as Art History," now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in the city’s Koto Ward.
Osaka-based Morimura, 47, burst onto the international art scene about 10 years ago with his "Art History" series, computer-aided reconstructions of great Western paintings that featured the artist’s big-nosed face replacing the faces of the works’ original subjects. The high-tech Japanese kitsch was embraced by a Western world passing through a period of growing interest in sushi, economic miracles, and things Japanese in general, and Morimura became somewhat of a superstar both at home and abroad. His more recent work has featured the artist made-up as Hollywood starlets, and has won the Osaka-based artist solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and ensured his inclusion in major group shows at scores of important galleries and museums around the world. The MoT exhibition is the most complete collection of the artist’s original "Art History" series ever presented.

Read the entire article here
Source: assemblylanguage.com

Yasumasa Morimura at Luhring Augustine by Nancy Princenthal

In his most extravagant exercise of borrowed identity to date, Yasumasa Morimura created a series of hybrid self-portraits modeled on works by Frida Kahlo. Morimura has been inserting himself into simulations of other artists' paintings (as well as actresses' movie stills) since the mid-1980s, and the more care he takes to achieve fidelity, the more fantastic his work becomes. The big new images, which involve heavy makeup, photography, painting, digital manipulation and even relief elements (three are tondos bordered with stamped foil and garlanded with fake flowers), reach a new level of elaboration and abandon.
To some extent, that simply goes with the territory. Kahlo's combination of a deeply personal symbolic vocabulary with indigenous Mexican and Spanish cultural references in lush, color-saturated imagery does not reflect (or encourage) moderation. Among the details Morimura re-creates unstintingly are collars of thorns and headdresses of blossoms and knotted rope; embroidered peasant shirts, virginal white dresses and bordello-red dressing gowns; parrots, monkeys and cats; lush tropical flora; and pre-Columbian stone beads in the form of skulls. Kahlo's beauty and self-possession, her faint mustache and distinctive linked eyebrows, her regal posture, challenging stare and insistent vulnerability are all captured with uncanny skill. Distinctions between what is recreated, retouched and invented digitally are difficult to discern.

Read the entire article here
Source: findarticles.com