Hollow (Black), 2018 by Takashi Murakami

Hollow (Black), 2018

Name: Hollow (Black), 2018
Brand: Takashi Murakami
Availability: InStock

Takashi Murakami

Medium: hand-signed silkscreen

Signature: signed, dated and annotated lower right

Image size: 14.75 x 11.87"

Price on Request

15513581

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0.8105

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"HOLLOW (Black)" is a silkscreen created by Takashi Murakami in 2018. From the edition of 100, the artwork is signed, dated and annotated lower right. The artwork ships framed and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Takashi Murakami's HOLLOW (Black), 2018 reveals a markedly different side of the artist's practice. Rather than centering one of his familiar smiling flowers or cartoon characters, this silkscreen reduces the composition to a single word—"HOLLOW"—rendered in bold, dripping white graffiti across fields densely packed with Murakami's signature skull motifs. The result is immediate and visually arresting yet layered with the tension between spectacle and meaning that has defined the artist's career.

At first glance, the monumental text dominates the composition. Painted in thick, spray-painted lettering that appears to drip down the surface, the word recalls the language of street art and contemporary urban culture. Beneath it, however, Murakami constructs a richly textured backdrop of overlapping skulls, repeated so densely that they become an almost abstract pattern. The skull, a recurring image throughout Murakami's oeuvre, carries multiple associations: mortality, impermanence, Japanese visual traditions, manga aesthetics, and the commercialization of symbols. By burying hundreds of skulls beneath a single declarative word, Murakami creates a work that rewards closer inspection, revealing hidden imagery that slowly emerges from the surface.

The title, HOLLOW, invites interpretation. It can suggest emptiness, absence, or emotional detachment, while also alluding to the superficiality of consumer culture—a subject Murakami has explored throughout his career. The dripping text appears both forceful and fleeting, as if freshly painted yet already dissolving. Against the endless field of skulls, the word becomes less a statement than an open question, encouraging viewers to consider what lies beneath polished surfaces, whether in art, society, or ourselves.

HOLLOW (Black) stands as compelling examples of the artist's ability to merge Pop aesthetics, Japanese visual culture, graffiti-inspired mark-making, and philosophical reflection into images that are visually bold while remaining intellectually resonant.

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Details

Medium: hand-signed silkscreen
Year: 2018
Edition: 100

Sheet size: 18.5 x 15"
Image size: 14.75 x 11.87"

Signature: signed, dated and annotated lower right

About the Work

About the Artist

Takashi Murakami (b.1962) trained in Nihonga at Tokyo University of the Arts (PhD, 1993). Around 2000 he introduced Superflat, his influential theory linking the planar aesthetics of Japanese art—from Edo screens to manga—to postwar consumer culture. His work has been the subject of major surveys including “©MURAKAMI” (MOCA LA; Brooklyn Museum; MMK Frankfurt; Guggenheim Bilbao, 2007–09), “Lineage of Eccentrics” (MFA Boston, 2017–18), and “Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” (The Broad, 2022; Cleveland Museum of Art, 2025). He founded Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., a studio-publisher that sustains his large-scale paintings and sculptures and a globally collected print program spanning silkscreens, archival pigment works, and offset lithographs, often enhanced with metallic foils and high-gloss varnishes. Murakami describes his practice as a continual “backcrossing” of historical and pop vocabularies, an art of joyful surfaces and complex memory.

Hollow (Black), 2018

$4,950.00

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