Yoshitomo Nara

‘Rediscover punk rock and your inner child at this memorable show.’ ***** Review of Yoshitomo Nara, Hayward Gallery – Evening Standard

Dive into the captivating, creative world of Yoshitomo Nara in the largest European retrospective of one of Japan’s most celebrated artists.

Accompanies the first UK solo exhibition at a public institution by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Spanning four decades of the artist’s work, it offers readers a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the personal and creative world of this internationally acclaimed artist.

Yoshitomo Nara primarily identifies as a painter while working across a wide range of mediums, such as drawing, collage, sculpture, installation and materials including found objects, cardboard, wood, plaster, textile, ceramic and fibreglass. He is widely known for his bold images of children with large heads and wide eyes that challenge the viewers with their direct gaze and defiant stance. These captivating yet ominous characters are part of a wider visual vocabulary established by Nara to explore and communicate themes of home, isolation, resilience, belonging, regeneration, hope and freedom.

Organised thematically, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and breadth of Nara’s artistic expression. It conveys Nara’s singular aesthetic drawn from his formative experiences in Japan and his time in Germany, as well as his ongoing environmental and societal concerns, which are deeply rooted in nature and the communities of Japan’s northern Tohoku region, where he grew up. Memories as a continuous flow runs through Nara’s work. This is in parallel with the inspiration he takes from popular music, which he has been listening to since childhood – folk songs by American singer-songwriters featuring antiwar messages, melancholic blues and, later, glam rock, punk and new wave.

The Hayward Gallery presentation is an expanded version of the touring exhibition from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden. It features a group of Nara’s most recent paintings, including several new works.

Author Biography

Born in 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture, Japan, Yoshitomo Nara graduated from Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in 1987. He moved to Germany in 1988 and enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied under A.R. Penck. Nara moved to Cologne in 1994 and returned to Japan in 2000. Since the mid-1990s, Nara has exhibited throughout Japan and internationally, in museums and galleries in the UK, Europe, the United States, Korea, China and Australia.

Yoshitomo Nara is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator, Yung Ma, with Assistant Curator, Katie Guggenheim, and Curatorial Assistant, Charlotte dos Santos.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, and the Hayward Gallery.