Yasumasa Morimura

In occasion of the 52nd Venice Biennale, the BLM is proud to present the first European solo exhibition of the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura (Osaka, 1951), curated by BLM director of photography Filippo Maggia. The exhibition presents an opportunity for reflecting on what in the 1980s were, precisely through Morimura’s work, the first steps taken towards that opening to Asian art that today is exploding in the direction of China, India and Korea. Moreover, the poetics of Morimura are focused precisely on the East’s necessity for welcoming and absorbing models of Western life. On exhibit in Venice will be a selection of works, all new and in large scale, made for the occasion of the 52nd Venice Biennale and grouped under the emblematic title Requiem for the XX Century. Also on exhibit will be a selection of videos inspired by such controversial twentieth century figures as the Japanese playwright and writer, Yukio Mishima, who committed suicide in 1970, in addition to an unique 10-minute recorded interview where the artist welcomes the public into his Osaka studio. A leading figure in today’s international art world, Morimura succeeds through his photography in giving us unexpected re-readings of certain principal themes in art, particularly that of painting, and does so by way of reinterpreting, first-hand, the works of famous European artists like Velazquez, Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Lucas Cranach and Monet.

“Seeing” and “being seen”, redefining sexual genders and the act of belonging to one gender group or subgroup – so ambiguous in our age that most of Morimura’s subjects are indeed women -, leads to an even more penetrating reflection encompassing religion, politics, and the acknowledgement of belonging to a particular time or historical age. And so follows the need for Morimura to point out the different perception that “I” can have of itself, and the ability of man and artist to experience an alternative role, thus lending the subject a significance that often transcends the actual history of “that” painting or of “that” particular artist, and leading to the creation of a “new” painting by a “different” artist. This thematic approach unmistakably comes from the choice that has distanced Morimura, ever since his childhood, from the study of ukiyo-e of Hokusai, or from suibokuga of Sesshu, and that has drawn him to artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso, in a sort of fatal attraction for all Western art, which is so varied in its styles and so distant from Japanese rigor. From here one can note other important chapters in the artist’s career: the series dedicated to actresses and the tributes made to fellow contemporary artists, such as in the famous To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman of 1998. Despite his evident predilection for Western art, Morimura searches for the points where the two cultures of East and West meet in order to provoke, but above all to understand, the effect that can be elicited in the public from seeing a Brigitte Bardot riding a motor cycle through the streets of Osaka or a fluttering Marilyn on a platform placed in the centre of a hall of the University of Tokyo. The ample series dedicated to the Mexican artist Frida Khalo, entitled An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo, reassumes and thoroughly takes into account Morimura’s artistic development and how much his interest in the many facets of the psyche determines the choice of every single detail in his photographs.

With Requiem for the XX Century Morimura offers new versions of some of the most famous images – icons for entire generations – of key figures from the twentieth century: Mao, Che Guevara, Charlie Chaplin’s comical Hitler, a playful Einstein, next to that of Mishima or Oswald. It is an invitation to reflect on the significance of the lives of such figures and on the weight their political, cultural, and above all social heritage has left us.

Yasumasa Morimura
Requiem for the XX Century
Twilight of the turbulant Gods
Ort: Galleria di Piazza San Marco, Venedig
Kurator: Filippo Maggia