ART-PRESENTATION:Mr.-Sunset in My Heart

Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto), began as protégé of Takashi Murakami, and has worked as an artist from 1996.  Paul McCarthy has commented that “The blending of a Lolita complex and otaku culture in his works … [has] ‘an unbearable irresistibility in its tiny, innocent world”, Mr.’s works range from drawings and paintings to large sculpture.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Mr.’s most recent body of work exemplifies a maturation and growth within his practice. While his aesthetic remains committed to the Superflat style*, for which he is best known, the works featured in the exhibition “Sunset in My Heart” highlight the influence that the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster have had on Mr.’s work in the years since. Mr. has returned to his expressive and experimental roots as a young artist, incorporating abstract elements like graffiti, and using distressed and sullied canvases. He prepares the canvases by burning them, walking over them, and leaving them on his studio floor to collect dirt and debris. This treatment of the canvas is directly connected to the artist’s early interest in the ’60s Italian Art Movement Arte Povera that inspired his first manga paintings he produced on store receipts, takeout menus, and other scraps of transactional detritus. Mr. uses the distressed surface of the canvas as a base for cartoon renderings. While the manga-style characters continue to appear in Mr.’s work, their significance has shifted from playing up lolicon (the fetishization of young, fictional female characters) toward a more platonic realm, known as moe, or love for an icon that does not carry sexual associations. These new characters represent positive beacons of strength that overcome all adversity. This reflects the artist’s creative impetus to embrace pleasure and beauty in diverse forms, instead of giving in to the personal and national despair that emerges after catastrophic loss and destruction, as it has in Japan since 2011

*Term coined by Takashi Murakami to link two-dimensionality in traditional Japanese paintings, known as Nihonga, with the flatness in contemporary Japanese visual art and animation.

 Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 W 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 23/6-12/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com