David Zwirner has announced its representation of Yoshitomo Nara. The gallery also announced it will present a solo show for the Japanese artist in its New York gallery. This announcement follows the closure of BLUM gallery earlier this year, which worked with Nara for 30 years. The artist will still work with Pace Gallery.
Nara is known for his intimate portraits of lone animals and children—distinguished by their oversized, searching eyes—that capture a charged mix of vulnerability and defiance. Much of his work draws on his childhood in rural Japan, shaped by the difficult economic years that followed World War II.
“To me, Nara’s work is not unlike a great song: personal, emotive, uncompromising, and open to experimentation,” David Zwirner said in a press statement. “Seeing Nara’s extensive and beautifully installed retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, earlier this year, was a true revelation. Again, I was struck by Nara’s enormous generosity as an artist; he readily invites us into his inner universe, while challenging us to confront our own, reminding us that we have the right to resist.”
Born in Hirosaki, Japan in 1959, Nara studied for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in Nagakute, Japan. Nara moved to Germany in the late 1980s, studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. He lived in Cologne in the 1990s, where he first started painting his signature large heads.
“Even after graduating from art school, my creative philosophy has not been one of ‘art for art’s sake,’” said Nara in a statement. “Rather, I believe it is something that exists within the freedom of how one lives. More than the art history or theory I learned in school, it is the spirit of the times—the one I absorbed while growing up and shared with others of my generation—that has shaped my unique sensibility. For example, what resonates with me is not the knowledge contained in hundreds of pages of books, but the reality of what this body has actually experienced. In the end, it is those lived experiences that bring to light the honest words buried within the heavy volumes of written knowledge.”
Nara’s inaugural institutional solo presentation, “Cup Kids,” was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Nagoya, Japan, in 1995. Since then, the artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. The Hayward Gallery recently presented a solo exhibition for the artist, the first at a public art gallery in the United Kingdom, which closed on August 31st.
