In recent years, Mr.'s artwork has approached the cityscape in fascinating ways. He also touched on urban culture in his paintings, and little elements like graffiti, advertising and pop-culture iconography would show up as the works got detailed and busy. In his most recent exhibition, Mr. is putting it right out in the open with the title Mr.’s Melancholy Walk Around the Town, on view through March 9, 2019 at Perrotin in Paris. The works capture snapshots of hyper-urban settings, with his signature characters covered in text, emojis and architecture backdrops.
As the gallery notes, "Mr.’s city, the city of Tokyo, the otaku neighbourhoods of Akihabara and Ikebukuro, is for him such a site. An interminable cacophony of words and images. A seductive fantasy of desire and dread. A space of street scribblings and graffiti, of conspicuous consumption and exhaustion. This is a land of the acerbically saccharine and the bitterly sweet, a land of rupture and flow, exuberance and estrangement. This is a terrain in which the cute and the terrifying, the kawaii and kowai, are as interchangeable as they are indeterminate, in which remedy and poison are always already interlinked."
