Yoshitomo Nara, Untitled, 2003, Graphite on paper, 16 1⁄2 × 23 5⁄8 in. (42 × 60 cm), Collection of the artist, © Yoshitomo Nara 2003, photo by Heather Rasmussen, courtesy of Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo
 

In one of his many backpacking trips to Europe in the early 1980s, Nara frequented museums with art historical masterpieces but was also struck by early devotional sculptures, such as the twelfth-century Mother and Child from the Church of Santa Maria de Covet at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. Drawn to the Romanesque style in which accentuated facial features reflect strong devotion, he saw an affinity with Buddhist sculptures, where strength of devotion is proportional to the amount of stylistic deformation and presence. These traditions would have a direct impact on the figuration in some of Nara’s first sculptures and paintings, characterized by disproportionately small arms and rounded or tapered feet as in Pray (1991).

In Nara’s earliest works made at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, allegories of good and evil collapse, and innocence becomes one with destruction itself. Compositions are divided in half or in quadrants, and figures with elongated heads wear halos, with their hands transforming into flames or knives. In People on the Cloud, a horizon line splits the composition—animals, people, and hybrid figures crawl along the outer edges of the frame. Nara masterfully situates the figures between symbolic and physical planes of the piece. Each figure is surrounded by anxiety and sadness, with gazes that verge on imminent violence.

A recurring theme in Nara’s early practice is confrontations with violence. An allegory for one’s ill-fated future, in this painting, a girl with a knife in one hand and a flame ball in the other walks toward a cat as if giving it the option to choose between the two. Red smoke inscribed with “Nothing ever happens, nothing” billows from a ball of fire in the girl’s hand, and the phrase “The needle returns the first of the song and we will sing like before” is scribbled on a blackboard invoking the lyrics of Scottish rock band Del Amitri’s 1989 “Nothing Ever Happens.”

This painting depicts a girl with her enlarged head wrapped in bandages and her legs submerged under the surface of rippling water that echoes the bandages and haunting, bean-like eyes. The work was featured in his first major gallery exhibition in Tokyo in 1995 and appeared on the cover of Nara’s first book of paintings in 1997. It features a motif that recurs in many of Nara’s paintings and sculptures, inspired by the cover of folk singer John Hiatt’s album Overcoats (1975), which shows the singer half-submerged in water wearing his overcoat.

Presented at Nara’s first major survey exhibition, I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME., at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2001, Fountain of Life is a motorized sculptural installation of heads with closed eyelids that tower over one another inside an enormous teacup with water that streams down the figures’ cheeks, forming a fountain of tears. The melancholy of this work is palpable, and the figures’ clean profiles evoke the abstract richly outlined paintings of Japanese abstract painter, Morikazu Kumagai, whom Nara has long admired.

An early representation of Nara’s strong stance against nuclear weapons, No Nukes is now synonymous with the antinuclear protest movement. Painted over a promotional poster for bossa nova musician Vinicius Cantuária’s Amor Brasileiro (1998) among other printed ephemera, in July 2012, it became a powerful symbol when the artist allowed protesters to download a high-resolution image of the work to use as picket signs during one of Japan’s largest antinuclear protests. Dubbed “No Nukes Girl,” as many as one hundred thousand people gathered to rail against the government’s decision to restart two nuclear reactors in Fukui prefecture, many with this image in hand.

Nara began creating portable installations of his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which ranged from the three-part installation S.M.L. (2003) to the epic twenty-six-installation exhibition A to Z (2006), in 2003. These domestic environments culminated in My Drawing Room, a painted wooden architectural structure that recreates Nara’s studio space. A hand-painted billboard with the words “Place Like Home” hangs on the exterior, and the inside features piles of drawings on the floor and a desk with figurines, mix CDs that Nara curated, vernacular paintings, drawings, ephemera, and collectibles from vintage Americana shops that the artist has accumulated over the years.

Nara selected the music playing here to complement this installation. The songs reflect his love of 1960s and ʼ70s singer- songwriters, who he began listening to as an adolescent and whose work greatly influenced his own.

Starting in 2005, Nara’s singular portraits began to take a dramatic turn, each projecting a complex expression that combines sadness, anger, and serenity. In Missing in Action – Girl Meets Boy, fire from an atomic bomb explosion is reflected in one of the eyes of the figure, representing a memory of Hiroshima, where this work is housed. The political valence of this work on paper connects the fading memory of the previous generation who experienced the war with the younger generation of Japanese youth who can only experience this decisive moment indirectly.

This work will be on view March-June 2021.

Nara uses his signature “bandage” technique, which he began in the mid-1990s, where he builds the surface up with strips of cotton to create a textured background, which is mounted on FRP board. A girl with pointy bangs and green eyes is submerged so far underwater that only her eyes, nose, and forehead are visible. The rounded structure of the dish-shaped canvas adds to the illusion of depth—as if one is witnessing the drowning of a figure who seems to be in a simultaneous condition of anger and passivity.

While confronting the 2011 nuclear disaster, Nara made Miss Spring (2012), a portrait of a wide-eyed girl with a high forehead who stands against a cherry-blossom pink background and stares straight at the viewer, with prism-like teardrops glistening in her eyes. A symbol of hope, this portrait served as the cover image for Ryūichi Sakamoto’s No Nukes 2012: Guidebook for Our Future. Miss Spring was used as a powerful backdrop banner by the protest organizers during the demonstrations.

In 2005 Nara moved into a beautiful studio that overlooks the green pastures in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, where he would eventually open N’s YARD, a space that houses his artwork and collection. The paintings he began making in this period are layered in a vast array of palettes that create a kaleidoscopic effect, with many works featuring different colored eyes. The backgrounds are often dark and thickly layered, with iridescent colors that float in and out of sight, evoking the existential effects of Mark Rothko’s soft, saturated forms. The works depict single figures and resemble portrait paintings by modern European artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, yet their singularity and directness—seen especially in recent works Can't Wait till the Night Comes (2012) and Miss Margaret (2016)—project a complex expression that combines sadness, anger, and serenity, which Nara achieves by reworking and repainting the faces multiple times.

Nara produced this painting in June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The artist considers this work a “study” in search of a new artistic stylistic direction. The patchwork of color on the hair and clothes, as well the peach hue beneath the surface of the skin, reflect an unfinished quality akin to French modernist landscape painting. The blended colors that emanate from underneath her glassy eyes are also a departure from the linear U-shaped marks in the eyes that reflect fire and other objects in previous paintings. The expression exudes a pensive warmth that differs from the distant, introspective gaze of his previous portraits, signaling an emotional shift that is affected by the pandemic, which impacted the installation of this retrospective.

Catalogue and other items available at the LACMA Store

Shop Now