Since the early eighties, Yasumasa Morimura has been invading the established canon of Western art—offering both wry commentary and loving tribute—by replacing the figures and faces of its well-known masterpieces with his own. After painstakingly recreating the surroundings of some of art-history’s most iconic paintings, like a chameleon, Morimura assumes their subjects’ identities through elaborate makeup and costume, and inserts himself into the scene. To view the resulting photographs is an uncanny experience.
Daughter of Art History begins with a foreword by renowned art historian Donald Kuspit who describes Morimura"s art as "a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which painting, sculpture, and photography form a seamless conceptual whole. His photographs may be mock masterpieces, but they are nonetheless masterpieces, for they show mastery of three mediums usually regarded as irreconcilable."
Morimura has shown extensively in international solo exhibitions, and his work is in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and TheSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art.