A Guide to Takashi Murakami’s Art
A smiling flower, a sharp-toothed cartoon, a carp streamer above Edo: Takashi Murakami’s pictures draw on Japanese painting, manga, fashion and the digital screen. His recurring subjects are a useful way into a body of work that keeps changing shape.
This guide follows Pinto Gallery’s Murakami categories through original paintings and sculptural works, with related editions noted along the way. The categories overlap: flowers can appear beside Doraemon, inside a sphere or beneath an ensō circle.
Flowers
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
A bouquet spreads across a silver-toned ground in Re: Flowers for Algernon. Each flower has a face, yet the group reads as a single restless mass. Murakami’s smiling flower motif dates to 1995 and grew out of his training in nihonga, the Japanese painting tradition.
This painting was exhibited in London in 2024–25. Its platinum leaf gives the flowers a reflective setting. A different treatment appears in Pinto Gallery’s An Homage to IKB, 1957 (2011): an offset edition using cold stamping. The blue monochrome branch of the series draws on Yves Klein’s signature colour and was explored in the 2011–12 exhibition Homage to Yves Klein.
Flower Ball
Photo: Norihiro Ueno. MCA Chicago.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
In Flower Ball 2, the flowers cover a curved, spherical surface. The work is a useful reminder that the Flower Ball motif also has a physical form: it can project into the viewer’s space as well as suggest depth on paper.
Made in 2002 with acrylic, canvas and wood, this original appeared in MCA Chicago’s 2017 retrospective. Pinto Gallery’s Beyond the Dimensions (2022) is a later, flat offset edition in the same visual family, using cold stamping and gloss varnish.
Louis Vuitton
Eye Love SUPERFLAT, 2003. Acrylic on canvas. Image: Christie’s.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
On the white ground of Eye Love SUPERFLAT, coloured eyes interrupt the repeating pattern. Murakami’s 2003 collaboration with Louis Vuitton made a luxury monogram behave like a field of cartoon characters: familiar, restless and suddenly full of faces.
This 2003 acrylic painting is a 60 cm square, with the monogram and eye motifs set against white. The related white silkscreen edition at Pinto Gallery carries these motifs into a larger, 76 cm work on paper.
Virgil Abloh
© Virgil Abloh & Takashi Murakami.
The pink and black of Glance past the future feel more abrasive than a conventional flower field. Murakami and Virgil Abloh made their joint works in Murakami’s Tokyo studio, bringing together the visual languages they had developed across art, music and fashion.
The painting appeared in future history in London in 2018. The related silkscreen edition brings the composition into a smaller format.
Mr. DOB
MoMA, gift of David Teiger.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
Mr. DOB’s round ears make him easy to recognise; his teeth make him harder to read. Created in 1993, the character can look friendly in one work and ferocious in the next. In the painting 727, the curling wave gives that instability a setting.
Now at MoMA, 727 spans nearly 4.5 metres across three panels. Its weathered-looking background was built through layers of paint and sanding. The later 727-727 edition (2007) revisits this world through offset printing with special silver.
Octopus
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
A grin stretches across We Are the Square Jocular Clan, with eyes and coloured forms crowded around it. The face seems to have outgrown its frame, an example of how Murakami stretches a familiar character into something less stable.
Pinto Gallery’s circular We Are The Jocular Clan (1) (2018) is a related edition. The rounded format changes how the face fills the image.
Doraemon
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. © Fujiko-Pro.
A pink door stands in a bed of smiling flowers. Doraemon’s Anywhere Door gives Murakami a ready-made way to move between worlds, bringing Fujiko F. Fujio’s beloved character into his own pictorial landscape.
The painting appeared in Change the Rule! in Hong Kong in 2018. The related 2019 edition uses silkscreen and cold stamping. Superflat Doraemon followed in Tokyo in 2019–20.
Ensō
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
The sprayed circle in Ensō: Night of the Full Moon carries the trace of a gesture. In Zen calligraphy, the ensō can suggest emptiness, unity or infinity. Murakami reworks the traditionally brushed circle through spray paint, bringing a loose-looking mark into his carefully controlled studio practice.
The illustrated painting dates to 2015, the year an Ensō exhibition in Tokyo explored this series. Pinto Gallery’s Ensō: The Heart (2015) offers a different composition from the series as a 68 cm offset edition with thick varnishing.
Kansei
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
A small cluster of flowers rises against gold in The Golden Age: Kōrin—Kansei. The circular painting leaves room around the stems and heads, giving them a different rhythm from the all-over flower fields. Its title points towards Ogata Kōrin and the patterned, gilded world of Rinpa painting.
The painting was shown in In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow in New York, 2014–15. Pinto Gallery’s Kansei Kōrin Red Stream (2010) is an earlier, related edition with a different composition. Cold stamping gives the edition its own metallic surface.
Skulls
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
In Red Life Force, hundreds of small skulls crowd the surface. Red runs through the painting, interrupted by white, green and flashes of bright colour. From a distance, the faces almost dissolve into a pattern; up close, their hollow eyes return.
This 2012 acrylic painting appeared in Flowers & Skulls in Hong Kong in 2012–13. It offers a different approach from the skull-shaped clouds of the Time Bokan works: here the skull becomes a repeating unit, filling a canvas more than three metres high. The series includes both densely layered compositions and single, emblematic heads.
Panda
Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Kei Okano.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
A panda meets a monogram and a flower-hatted figure. This 2025 painting shows how Murakami’s characters move between art and fashion.
Exhibited in New York in 2025, it is a later use of the panda, rather than the source for Pinto Gallery’s Panda Family Gold (2016).
Murakami.Flowers
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
The rounded petals give way to square steps in Murakami Flower #9727 Rainbow. The image keeps the flower’s familiar face while borrowing the visibly blocky structure of early video games. Here, the edge of each pixel becomes part of the drawing.
An Arrow through History in New York (2022) brought the project into physical paintings. Pinto Gallery’s related 2023 edition combines archival pigment printing and silkscreen. The image number is separate from the print’s edition number; this is a physical print, with no NFT transfer implied.
Explore Murakami.Flowers Series
Hiroshige
Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Kei Okano.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
A huge carp streamer hangs over a distant city in Suidō Bridge and Surugadai. The abrupt shift between foreground and background comes from Hiroshige’s nineteenth-century view of Edo. Murakami keeps that startling composition while rebuilding its surfaces in his own colours and materials.
JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige in New York (2025) presented 121 canvases responding to Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The related 2025 edition translates the large painting into a work on paper, with glitter, pearl and mica added to the printed surface.
Rare
Marciano Art Foundation. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy of the artist. Image: Vancouver Art Gallery.
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
Murakami’s 100 Arhats stretches a procession of Buddhist figures across a long, gilded surface. The arhats, or rakan, are enlightened disciples; their exaggerated faces give a traditional religious subject a distinctly Murakami presence.
The 2013 painting appeared in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2018 retrospective. Pinto Gallery’s 4 Arhats, One With Four Eyes (2015) is a related edition within this wider subject. “Rare” is a catalogue grouping, rather than the name of an artistic series.
Goods
© Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
In Hello (Flower), a smiling flower becomes a wall-mounted sculpture. Its thick petals and projecting face give a familiar motif an actual profile: the image changes as the viewer moves around it.
The sculpture appeared in Change the Rule! in Hong Kong in 2018. It offers context for Murakami’s move from images into objects. Pinto Gallery’s Goods category includes DOBtopus B (2017), a separate cast-vinyl multiple with a different character and edition size.