Yoshitomo Nara - Yoshitomo Nara - 2020s

Yoshitomo Nara (born in 1959)



NEW POSTER 60x85 approx

Exhibition at the Baden-Baden Museum (Germany) from November 2024 to April 2025.

The Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara (born 1959) is one of the most well-known artists of his generation. He gained international notoriety thanks to his “Angry Girls”: representations of children, usually large-scale with piercing eyes, that have a threatening, defiant, furious, or even melancholic and uncertain air. They have long been regarded as true icons of contemporary painting. Even though his powerful portraits recall the “manga”—cult Japanese comics—the characters, animals, and hybrid creatures of Nara are above all reflections of his own memories and emotional worlds. Thus, in these depictions, the artist also grapples with his own childhood experiences, often marked by loneliness and isolation because his parents worked. But his love of music and literature, his knowledge of the history of Japanese and European art, and his engagement with other cultures also serve as highly diverse sources of inspiration. In his works, Nara opposes the typical Japanese “kawaii” aesthetic, which relies on highly minimal motifs, with rebellious and defiant protagonists. They are emblematic of the artist’s pacifist, socially critical, and world-open attitude, which is also shaped by his intensive study of Japan’s historical role during World War II. With the exhibition “Yoshitomo Nara,” Museum Frieder Burda presents, through paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations spanning four decades, the first major retrospective of this exceptional artist in Germany. In a sense, the Japanese artist makes a kind of return to the country that was an important step in his biography. Nara was born in 1959 in the suburbs of Hirosaki, in the northernmost part of Japan. After studying painting at Aichi University of Arts, he was drawn to the prestigious art academy in Düsseldorf toward the end of the 1980s. He stayed twelve years in Germany, where he developed his unique visual language. In 2000, he returned to Japan, where he remains artistically active. The exhibition was realized in close collaboration with Yoshitomo Nara himself and is the product of a partnership with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Hayward Gallery in London. Among the many international lenders are the Jumex Collection in Mexico City, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Notably, many of the exhibition’s highlights include numerous masterpieces from international private collections, which are usually inaccessible to the public.”} }

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