Yoshitomo Nara’s children, at first glance, seem kind-hearted. With their large heads, they have an appearance between adorable and terrifying, between melancholic and threatening. Some hold knives, others small flowers. Others hide cigarettes behind their backs.
The work of one of the most important contemporary Japanese artists can be discovered starting this Friday at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in the Basque city. The exhibition, open until November 3, is Yoshitomo Nara’s first major solo retrospective in Europe and was designed especially for the museum’s gallery space in Bilbao. It then heads to Baden-Baden and London, where it will be reconfigured according to the location.
Inside the building designed by Frank Gehry, 128 works reveal an extensive oeuvre. In addition to canvases and sketches, there are some sculptures, such as Fountain of life (2001/2014/2022), in which tears flow from the eyes of children whose heads overlap, as if coming from a fountain. However, it is the paintings of children with disturbing looks that attract the most attention. What motivates those who paint them? What do these figures with multicolored pupils and eyes shaped like orange segments feel? The question comes at the end of a busy press conference, with journalists from various corners of Europe. The inquirer assumes the simplicity of the question that the artist borders with silences and detours, until finally assuming: “I am trying to find an answer, it would be appropriate, but I don’t have it.” He often acknowledges: “If I could answer, I would stop painting. Deep down I know what they mean, but I can’t put it into words. That’s why I do it in my works.”
Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Hirosaki, a small town in northern Japan, known for being the largest producer of apples in the country. From childhood he voraciously consumed television shows and comics, while also developing a deep interest in music, which would influence his artistic practice. By the age of eight, he was spending his evenings listening to the Far East Network, the radio station at the US Air Force base in Misawa. Exposure to American and European pop music of the 1960s, and later punk of the 1970s, would prove to be one of his greatest influences.
After graduating from the Aichi University of Arts in 1987, he continued his studies at the Kunstakademie Düisseldorf in Germany. Without speaking a word of German, she spent her days drawing. There he held his first individual exhibitions and began to sell some works, far from imagining, four decades later, the weight that his name would imply in the market. In October 2019, Sotheby’s sold the work. Knife behind the back (2000) for a record $25 million.
But, as the retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao aims to show, Nara’s art is more than just an exorbitant price tag. Just as the artist is more than just his bank account.
“I haven’t changed at all. I’m even afraid of changing,” says Yoshitomo Nara, before the press. And he continues: “I’m afraid that money will change me. I now have more money and more exhibitions in my bank account, but the happiest time of my life was when I lived in Germany, I was a student and I didn’t have any exhibitions. At that time I was capable of painting 120 works a year and I spent the nights talking with my classmates at the University. These are things that money cannot buy.”
Nara has a status of rock star, but a discreet attitude. In the vicinity of the museum he goes unnoticed, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a cap on his head. “These clothes I’m wearing are much better than wearing something brand name,” he jokes in front of the cameras, focused on sweatshirt She looks young and only her white hair betrays her 64 years. “In the case of fashion, I prefer it to be sustainable, to share my way of seeing life,” says the artist, who recently collaborated again on a clothing collection with designer Stella McCartney, a reference in sustainability in the luxury segment. “I like to work with small brands, with people with whom I maintain dialogue, even if we live far away. I collaborated with people who invited me to dinner at their house, with whom I met their relatives, who could be my friends. This is a treasure,” she says. “I prefer to work with people who don’t want everything to be a business. I don’t like it.” commercialization“. On the ground floor, in the Guggenheim store, there is no shortage of options for memories: There are notebooks, cloth bags, t-shirts, thermoses, mugs, coasters, trays and cup cases with illustrations of strange girls with disturbing eyes.
It took three years of effort to gather 128 works from various private collections, Japanese, American, Swiss and French museums in the Basque Country. Lucía Aguirre, curator of the exhibition, reveals that they were looking for a retrospective of a “personal” nature, covering the four decades of creation. Proof of this is that the exhibition begins with a sketch from 1984 and culminates with a painting from 2023, midnight tearsconceived during the preparation of the exhibition and which the curator tells the Observer is “unlikely” to have been shown before.
This is one of the last works in the exhibition, which gives way to a thematic area in which the artist reveals the activist side to which he has been committed over the last two decades: the trip he made to Afghanistan in 2003 is highlighted by the commissioner. as a turning point, such as the Fukushima nuclear tragedy in 2011. No to war, Stop the bombs, Peace girl, From the air raid shelter, Cassome works have titles.
The exhibition design, imagined by the artist, gives the works room to breathe, so that the melancholy and uncertainty emanating from the paintings can settle in. There are tear-filled eyes, pursed lips on the verge of a smile, closed mouths, restrained emotions.
“Sometimes people say they don’t want to see my works, or that they don’t want their children to see them,” says the artist. Nara’s recurring characters may be childish, but what they evoke is more universal. “They are girls because we say so, and you can read it in the titles.” [das obras]“But they have no gender or age,” observes the curator of the exhibition. “Your universe is much more complex and profound than its appearance suggests. He is one of the great painters of our time, but, above all, the one who best conveys humanity with his work.”
The Observer traveled to Bilbao invited by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Source: Observadora
