The Collection of Shawn & Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace LA: Online Only 
13 September 2024
The Collection of Shawn & Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace LA: Online Only 
480

Takashi Murakami b.1963

Melting DOB (A)

2019
painted cast vinyl 9¼ h × 10½ w × 6½ d in (23 × 27 × 17 cm)
estimate: $1,000–2,000
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Impressed signature and manufacturer's mark to underside ‘Takashi ©TM/KK Made in Japan’. This work is number 54 from the edition of 300 produced by Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., Tokyo. Sold with a certificate of authenticity from Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. and original packaging.
provenance: MOMA Design Store, New York | Collection of Shawn and Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace Projects, Los Angeles

This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.

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History is history, now is now. Forget about history: now is happy.

Takashi Murakami

Q & A With Andrew Hosner

Reflecting on nearly 20 years of LA’s Thinkspace Projects, Andrew Hosner spoke with Fine Art Specialist Leon Benrimon about the history of the gallery, the collection he built with his wife Shawn Hosner, the evolution of LA's art scene, and more. This is an excerpt of our full Q & A, which can be viewed here. 

Leon Benrimon: I’ve read that you and Shawn really considered yourselves art collectors first and gallery owners second. Could you describe how you began collecting?

Andrew Hosner: When I first came out to Los Angeles to be with Shawn, we knew that we wanted to have a couple hobbies and we were always both kind of into antiques due to our parents, especially the mothers on both sides. We had started going to flea markets pretty early on, Rose Bowl being a favorite, and were collecting the old early acrylic radios from the fifties and sixties, just because we felt it was a connection to both of us being in the music industry. From there, that led us into slowly starting to go out to gallery openings. Shawn was already a regular of Merry Karnowsky and a few other galleries back then, like Corpo Gallery and some others. We eventually bought our first print together and then not too long after that, we bought our first little original from BLK/MRKT Gallery, which was Dave Kinsey's gallery who had started Studio No. 1 with Shepard Fairey back in the day, and we had been going to his gallery. So when he opened BLK/MRKT we were excited to go check that out and support it. And it was the second solo show from Jeff Soto after he had had his big first solo with Marsea over at New Image Art. That was the first little original we had bought, I think it was a little 6-by-9 for $300. I’ve actually held on to that one, couldn’t let that one go.

LB: Do you remember what your first print purchase was?

AH: I know Shawn’s first print purchase of any significance was Mark Ryden, Balloon Boy. A friend of hers encouraged her to get it on a credit card and that still hangs in the house, too. I think our first print that we bought together, I want to say was a Joe Sorren. But there’s a part of me that thinks that might have been Ryden, too. Actually no, it was Camille Rose Garcia, it just popped into my head. It was a big print that’s in the auction actually, hand-embellished with lots of glitter and things of that. That was the first piece where we found out that some dealers are Satan and will actually let you pay on payments, which we do now too. You always see the look in the person’s face, like, I thought I talked to myself out of buying it, damn it. But then they’re like, you’re gonna let me pay for it over the next six months?

That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich.

That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich. That you could get by putting three or four hundred down a month over the course of six, seven, eight months and get a little $2,000 or $3,000 piece—which for the first many years we collected, I don’t think we ever went too north of $2,000 or $3,000, just because that was our comfort zone.

LB:  What draws you in or appeals to you when you’re looking at artworks?

AH: The first rule of buying for us, and myself moving forward, will always be you have to like it. We’ve never really tried to buy simply because of a name. When you’re just buying because of name, it seems like you're almost collecting bugs or something. Like, you don't care what the art is, you just want to have that person in your specimen realm. And I get that, and a lot of that’s driven by different facets of the art world and such like that. But we’ve always had to make sure that we really wanted to live with it for the rest of our lives, if we could.

LB: How would you describe the aesthetic that draws you in?

AH: I've been asked that question a lot over the years and we've always just said we show and buy what we like, and then when people try to drill into it, I would say that there's stuff that I’ve bought in the last few years that I don't think I would’ve ever bought 20 years ago and vice versa. So I think, as with everything in life, tastes change and you also just grow when you get exposed to more travels and exposed to more people and exposed to more, I guess just outlets of creativity. By and large, if it's got a cat in it, that's always going to win, just because we're cat folks.

Past that, we’ve purchased everything from abstract to super-realism to all manner of sculpture. I think the only thing we never really delved too far down was video art, even though we do have one little piece. There's no real way to pigeonhole it. We definitely like things that capture a time, but we're also not looking to be too time-specific. I mean, definitely figurative always wins, I guess. That might be the best way to put it, we're definitely more figurative, and I myself as a curator have always geared our vision a bit more towards the figurative-driven than the abstract.

Takashi Murakami b. 1963

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Takashi Murakami is celebrated for his unique synthesis of refined classical painting techniques with an amplified mix of Pop art and anime. Murakami’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to fashion, branded merchandise, and animated films.

Born February 1, 1962 in Tokyo, Japan, Takashi Murakami received his formal training at Tokyo University of the Arts (formerly Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), where he received his B.F.A. in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1993. Murakami studied Nihonga (“Japanese-style painting”), which draws on classical Japanese subjects, techniques, and materials. The term Nihonga, coined around 1900 during the Meiji restoration of imperial rule, is used to distinguish traditional Japanese art from the appropriated Western style of painting known in Japan as Yōga.

Murakami’s unmistakably graphic style and Pop-derived motifs, such as his self-consciously “cute” (if sometimes disturbing) anime-esque characters rendered in bright colors, has graced handbags, phone cases, skateboards, and album covers. Murakami’s particular blend of fine art and hyper-commercialism is a totem of his Superflat theory, perhaps most clearly exemplified in his notable collaborations with pop culture superstars.

In 2002, Marc Jacobs, then working with the house of Louis Vuitton, invited Murakami to redesign Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2003 accessories collection. The artist produced several iconic designs including the must-have white “It” bag that re-envisioned the company’s monogram and became an integral part of the zeitgeist of the early naughts, effectively elevating Takashi Murakami to celebrity status.

During his 20+ year career, Takashi Murakami has distinguished himself variously as a major producer, curator, theorist and entrepreneur of art. He organized the “SUPERFLAT” exhibition in 2000—an exploration of Japanese art which aimed to trace the origins of contemporary Japanese visual popular culture. From 2002 to 2014, Murakami organized a unique art fair called Geisai, which he developed to enable artists to interact directly with potential buyers. Time magazine named Murakami one of the "100 Most Influential People" in 2008, the only visual artist included in that year’s list. In September 2010, Murakami became the first Japanese artist, and only the third contemporary artist, to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles, filling 15 rooms and the surrounding park with his sculptures, paintings, and decorative objects.

In 1996, Takashi Murakami established the Hiropon factory in Tokyo. By 2008, this enterprise had evolved into an art production and management corporation known as Kaikai Kiki Co., which supports the marketing and production of Murakami's art and related work., Moreover, according to their website, KaiKai Kiki seeks “to create new and deeper links between art and the world at large,” functioning as a supportive environment for the fostering of emerging artists, among them KAWS, Virgil Abloh, Mark Grotjahn, Matthew Monahan, Anselm Reyle, Aya Takano, Chiho Aoshima, ob, Mr., Rei Sato and Friedrich Kunath.

Murakami’s work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in arts institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001, 2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2017); the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York (2017).

Auction Results Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami

Monogram Cherry; Monogram Mini Multicolore-Black; Monogram Mini Multicolore-White; Monogram......(5)

estimate: $25,000–35,000

result: $50,000

Takashi Murakami

Louis Vuitton Group (4)

estimate: $25,000–35,000

result: $25,000

Takashi Murakami

Monogram Multicolore - Black

estimate: $16,000–18,000

result: $21,600

Takashi Murakami

Monogram Multicolore - White

estimate: $16,000–18,000

result: $20,400

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