Yoshitomo Nara

YOSHITOMO NARA (Japan, 1959).
"Marching on a butterbur leaf", 2019.
Offset lithograph.
Edition of 1000 copies.
Measurements: 61 x 47.7 cm.
Yoshitomo has become a cult artist, and his works are sought after by the most prestigious galleries. At a Christie's auction his painting "Be Happy" fetched $36,000. The secret of his popularity seems to lie in the fact that he amalgamates coldness and tenderness, violence and innocence, perversity and naïff aesthetics. He drinks from multiple languages: graffiti, anime, punk art, comics... He currently lives in Tokyo and has exhibited in many parts of the world. He graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Aichi in 1985, obtaining a master's degree at the same university after two years. Between 1988 and 1993 he studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Nara emerged from the Japanese pop art movement of the 1990s. His works are at the same time bellicose and simple. In them he even depicts children or animals with weapons and an inquisitive gaze, but for Nara his creations are not aggressive at all. Nara was educated after World War II and is the spokesman for a generation that takes refuge behind naïve or kawaii aesthetics to demonstrate its disagreement with traditional Japanese society. "Angry face" belongs to an early stage of his production. In 1987, he had just finished his postgraduate degree in art and his source of inspiration was Western art rather than Japanese art: the irreverence of Basquiat and the spontaneity of American graffiti, as well as the tearfulness of German expressionism seem to be his models. The desire to give free rein to the existential uncertainty of youth is revealed in the primitivism of the brushstroke, in the thickness of the stroke, in the depth of the stony gaze, in the disjointed and animalized face. An imperious need to forge one's own language is already revealed, which will derive in the parade of girls of perverse girls with big eyes.