Detail of 727 by Murakami in the Museum of Modern Art, August 2010

Takashi Murakami
727
1996


Medium: Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, three panels

Dimensions: 9' 10" x 14' 9" (299.7 x 449.6 cm)

Credit: Gift of David Teiger

Object number: 251.2003.a-c

Department: Painting and Sculpture


A stylized wave crashes across the three panels of Murakami’s 727, each of which features a mottled purple-blue background. In the center of the composition, a curious creature surfs the spray, its red eyes shining and spiky teeth revealed in a daring expression of glee. The figure’s rotund form is framed by ear-like orbs emblazoned with the letters of its name: DOB. Created by Murakami in 1993, Mr. DOB was among the first in a pantheon of characters inspired by the culture of anime (cartoons) and manga (comics) that emerged in Japan’s postwar era and became wildly popular in the 1980s.

Mr. DOB functions as an endlessly morphing alter ego of sorts for the artist, appearing in every facet of his production—in or on paintings, sculptures, key chains, and plush toys—reinforcing with each repetition the character’s iconic status. In this painting, a ferociously cute DOB is subsumed in a dappled expanse—produced by building up and sanding down some twenty layers of acrylic paint—which recalls nihonga painting, the traditional style in which the artist was trained. Through this conflation of historical and contemporary forms, as well as an insistent two-dimensionality, 727 anticipates Murakami’s Superflat theory of 2000, in which past and present, fine art and pop consumerism are collapsed into a single entity, a plane, the artist has explained, “not bound by limits, not connected to the system, not filled with information. It is a blank slate.”
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum
of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

Text from: www.moma.org/collection/works/88960