Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara (奈良美智, b. 5 December 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture) is one of the most internationally visible Japanese artists of the post-1990 generation and a major figure in the Superflat movement. His mature work consists of large-eyed solitary children — frequently a girl in her early years, sometimes a dog — set against monochrome or graphically simple grounds, painted in a vocabulary that combines Western punk-rock graphic culture with the delicate ink-line tradition of mid-century Japanese ehon (picture books). The figures are at once sweet and faintly menacing, and they have become one of the most-recognised graphic signatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Nara was born and raised in Hirosaki, in the snowy Tohoku region of northern Japan, and the rural Tohoku landscape and folk-culture imagery remain visible throughout his work. He completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting at Aichi University of the Arts in Nagakute, then moved to Germany in 1988 to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under A. R. Penck, completing his degree there in 1993. The German period was decisive: Penck's painterly drawing-based practice, the proximity to the Düsseldorf-based Pop and Kinder-figuration scenes, and Nara's own embrace of European punk and indie rock culture combined to produce the distinctive graphic vocabulary he subsequently brought back to Japan in 2000.

Nara has been associated since the mid-1990s with the Superflat movement defined by Takashi Murakami — both artists trained at Aichi or its institutional satellites and both produce work that mobilises Japanese graphic-culture sources (manga, anime, kawaii, ukiyo-e) for a global art-world audience. The principal difference between them is one of tonal register: where Murakami works with explicit ukiyo-e and otaku reference and bright multi-colour palettes, Nara restricts himself to a single-figure motif against simple grounds, working in muted earth tones with occasional accents of vivid red or blue. The 2000 exhibition 'Tomato Head' in Tokyo and the subsequent 'I Don't Mind, If You Forget Me' (Yokohama Museum of Art 2001) launched his Japanese reputation; international recognition followed rapidly through major exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2010), the Asia Society New York (2010-11), and many others.

Nara's printmaking is a substantial and continuously expanding part of his practice. Since the late 1990s he has worked across screenprint, lithograph, intaglio (etching, drypoint), digital print, and — most distinctively — traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing using master Japanese carvers, water-based pigments, and handmade washi paper. The 2010 'Untitled' suite of ten ukiyo-e woodcuts is his most-collected print series; the woodcuts use Edo-period techniques from the workshops that previously produced the prints of Hiroshi Yoshida and other modern Japanese woodblock artists, but apply those techniques to Nara's contemporary cartoon-derived figures. Other notable prints include 'No Fun!' (1997 lithograph), 'Y.N. (Self-Portrait)' (2002 intaglio), 'In The Cloud' (2003 lithograph), 'Star Island' (2003), 'Fuckin' Politics' (2003), 'Cosmic Girl Eyes Open' / 'Eyes Closed' (2008 offsets), 'Marching On A Butterbur Leaf' (2019 offset), 'Real One' (2020), and 'Miss Spring' (2021). At auction, prints account for approximately 39% of Nara's sales, with most reaching the £1,000-£5,000 range and the highest prints — particularly the 2010 ukiyo-e woodcuts and key signed lithographs — fetching up to £50,000 individually.