Gagosian's 24th street gallery is currently host to a striking contrast in contemporary art styles. The majority of the gallery contains a solo show titled Monochrome Generation by German artist Anselm Reyle. The show contains many over-sized, expensively fabricated sculptural elements made of shiny chrome and affixed with led lights. I'm sure are these destined for a life sparkling up the lobby of some faceless multi-national finance company.
The wall pieces created from found objects are slightly more inetersting but the selection of objects, bits of machinery, chain linkage, and bottle caps, is pretty uninspired and the homogenizing nature of the monochroming process removes any of their life and interest. The uninspired spectacle is capped off with a haphazard pile of hay bales constucted of silver tinsel that appear to have escaped from the Christmas party in Less Than Zero. Though Calrygirl and I did get a kick out of the lone bale found in a separate room under plexiglas as if it had to be quarantined from the others for anti-social behavior. Over all the collection yields little more than a cluttered gallery full of tired design objects whose only remarkable features are gloss and scale. The experience left me not only unengaged and uninspired but repulsed and in a strange way personally offended.
Tucked away the gallery's front room, in striking contrast, is Takashi Murakami's Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind, a large enchanting mural based on the China-Lion mythology of Japanese Buddhism. Murakami is no stranger to audacious fabrications with big price tags. He is one of the most succesful artists in the world has over the top shows up in seemingly every major city at the moment. But in contrast to the pop and shine of Reyle's work this single painting, given a room of it's own to breathe, is intimate and inviting.
The layered detail work of the painting's background, the result of the melding of classical techniques with cutting edge technology, would be remarkable on it's own. The color pallet is soft but vibrant and closer inspection yields meticulus detail. The main image does what Murakami does best, entangling the adorable with darka nd severe. It teases our intimate reactions and desires until we are left pondering the sublime. The cartoon skulls, a hallmark of the Murakami visual lexicon, here in a massive pile carry both the weight and comical inevitability of our mortality. Their comedic/grim dicotomy as striking an image of death as the fierce/adorable lion cubs are symobls of youth and rebirth.
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