Murakami's Rinpa Flowers Head to Art Mumbai With Perrotin

Takashi Murakami's smiling flowers have an older family, and Perrotin brought it to Mumbai. Rinpa Flowers, a 2026 Murakami painting, hangs in the gallery's first booth at Art Mumbai, and it reworks the floral motifs of Japan's Edo period Rinpa school, Ogata Kōrin's in particular, in Murakami's Superflat style.

That one painting sets the brief for the whole stand. Perrotin picked ten artists who all go back to something old, a myth, a genre or an ornament, and bring it forward. It's a smart first move in a new city. Nobody walking Booth C93 needs a primer on the gallery to get the idea.

The fair runs at the Mahalaxmi Race Course until Sunday, November 15.

Rinpa Flowers Goes Back to Ogata Kōrin

Murakami has been working this seam all year. In February and March, Perrotin Los Angeles showed his solo exhibition Hark Back to Ukiyo e, and its last room set his flowers beside four hollyhock paintings modeled on compositions by the Rinpa artists Kōrin and Kenzan.

Rinpa Flowers carries that line to a new audience. Rinpa painting is flat, decorative and full of pattern, which is a big part of why Murakami's Superflat reads as a descendant and not a gimmick. His grinning flower faces sit on top of a very old way of painting flowers.

That's the take worth having here. Murakami gets filed under pop and merch, and his flower has even been turned into fine jewelry with Alex Moss. This painting is the reminder that the motif has a pedigree, and that he's the one pointing at it.

He's busy this week. Perrotin also brought two new Murakami paintings to its booth at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai.

A Fire Extinguisher Covered Edge to Edge

The other nine artists split along that one line, old forms put to work.

Daniel Arsham and Vivian Greven both draw on classical heritage, looking for the point where reality and fantasy meet. For Arsham that's familiar ground. His Time Fold survey at Perrotin London ran through August 8 with crystallised busts of Zeus and Pericles at its center.

Nikki Maloof goes after the vanitas, the old still life built to remind you that you're going to die. Her Blue Picnic, from 2025, turns it into a picnic that's playful and a little unsettling at once.

Wim Delvoye takes horror vacui, the urge to cover every surface with ornament, and spends it on an ordinary fire extinguisher. It's the funniest object on the list and the most serious about craft. Delvoye is also in Perrotin's Panorama show in Paris, on view at Matignon through January 16, 2027.

Jean-Michel Othoniel is represented by Precious Stonewall, from 2025. JR, Hugo Toro and Bharti Kher fill out the ten. Kher lives and works in New Delhi, and her signature material is the bindi, so for her this is a home fair more than a fair stop.

Eel Pie Island Once Booked the Rolling Stones

Nick Goss brings the booth's best backstory. Eel Pie Island Sunrise is part of a series built around the Eel Pie Hotel, which stood on an island in the Thames at Twickenham, in West London.

The hotel was a music room before it was a painting. The Rolling Stones held a residency there, and David Bowie, Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd all came through before fire destroyed the building in the 1970s.

Goss showed the full series, eleven new paintings, at Josh Lilley Gallery in London from April 24 to May 23, 2026. He builds them in distemper, silkscreen and oil, layering archive photographs that he's said he cloned and distorted. "I'm combining places that do exist to create a fiction," he told Ocula.

That line fits the whole booth. Every work on the stand takes something real and old, a Rinpa flower, a classical bust, a West London hotel, and lets it slip a little.

Six Galleries Make Their Art Mumbai Debut

Art Mumbai's fourth edition opened Thursday, November 12, with 94 exhibitors, 73 of them Indian and 21 international. Six international galleries are making their Art Mumbai debut this year, and Perrotin and Richard Saltoun are among them. Lisson Gallery and Galleria Continua are back.

The newcomers aren't coming quietly. Night Gallery is in Mumbai for the first time too, with Robert Nava's Cat Dragon, a 72 by 82 inch canvas from 2021.

For Perrotin, Mumbai is one more stop in a busy Asian run. Days earlier the gallery was at Art Collaboration Kyoto, where Othoniel built a site specific installation called In the Garden of Love, and this week it's also showing a Jeppe Hein solo presentation in Shanghai. Mumbai is the newest city on that route.

Kōrin's flowers came out of Edo Japan. Murakami's version of them is smiling back from a race course in Mumbai.