YASUMASA MORIMURA (Osaka, 1951). "Doublonage". Photograph,... Lot 2

YASUMASA MORIMURA (Osaka, 1951). "Doublonage". Photograph, copy 1/10. Signed and titled on the back. Size: 102 x 81 cm. In "Doublonage", Morimura pays homage to Paul Outerbridge, one of the masters of colour photography who made his mark in New York in the 1930s. Specifically, the Japanese artist bases his work on "Ide necklace", Outerbridge's first advertising commission, which was published in Vanity Fair magazine the year after it was made, although with slight nuances with respect to the original: Morimura dispenses with the letters and labels on the object, thus stripping it of the indications that help to contextualise it. Outerbridge's photograph is kept in important international museums, such as the Met and MoMA in New York. Morimura is a Japanese appropriationist artist. He was born in Osaka and graduated from Kyoto City University of the Arts in 1978. Since 1985, he has shown his work mainly in solo exhibitions internationally, although he has participated in several group exhibitions. Morimura takes images of historical artists (from Édouard Manet to Rembrandt and Cindy Sherman), and inserts his own face and body into them. He even disguises himself as the main subjects that appear in the artworks he appropriated - many of which go against his racial, ethnic and gender boundaries as an Asian man, because most of the artworks he appropriates have Western subjects, particularly female subjects. He also inserted himself into some of the Western male subjects, and most of those works deal mainly with race and ethnicity. Through the use of disguises, he overrides the effects of the male gaze, gender, race, ethnicity and cultural standards, challenging traditional methods of portraiture that alters the original Western artworks by incorporating details related to Japanese culture. For example, in one of his works, Portrait (Futago), he changes the floral shawl of the original artwork, Olympia by Manet, with a kimono decorated with cranes. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1992), the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jouy-en-Josas, France (1993), the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994), the Guggenheim Museum. Museum (1994), the Yokohama Museum of Art in Yokohama, Japan (1996), the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (2006), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2007), among others, and his work is now owned by the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994), the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994), and the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994). Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) are among the public collections that hold works by Morimura.