Yoshitomo Nara, “The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand”, 1991, Vicki and Kent Logan, fractional and promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, © Yoshitomo Nara 1991, photo by Ikuhiro Watanabe, courtesy of the artist.
Yoshitomo Nara at LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents ‘Yoshitomo Nara’, the first international retrospective of artist Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959). April 5 – August 23, 2020.]]>
Source: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
The exhibition surveys more than 30 years of the artist’s work—from 1984 to 2020—through the lens of his longtime passion to music. Known for his portraits, Nara’s subjects are vaguely ominous-looking characters with penetrating gazes that occasionally wield objects just as knives or cigarettes, as well as heads and figures that float in dreamy landscapes. Nara’s oeuvre reflects the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self, taking inspiration from memories of his childhood; music; literature; studying and living in Germany (1988–2000); exploring his roots in Asia; and modern art from Europe and Japan. “Yoshitomo Nara” comprises more than 100 major works, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, an installation that recreates his drawing studio, and never-before exhibited idea sketches that reflect the artist’s empathic eye. One of the exhibition highlights includes “Miss Forest”, a 26-foot outdoor painted bronze sculpture.
Nara’s love of music ended up providing him with an unorthodox art education: the images on record covers not only became signifiers for music but also introduced him to a vast array of artistic genres, with covers and their corresponding music merging in his subconscious. For the young Nara, growing up in Japan among the shadows of war and economic recovery, the records and their covers served as sources of escape and eventually as a valuable form of self-empowerment, allowing him to deal with the complexities of living with the remnants of Japan’s imperial past and in close proximity to signs of ongoing conflict. Today, Nara’s studio wall displays a vast array of records he has accumulated over the past 40 years, including folk, rock, blues, soul, and punk albums.
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