ART CITIES: London-Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara’s work spans painting, drawing, photography, large-scale installations, and sculpture in ceramic, bronze, and fibre-reinforced plastic. Influenced by popular music, memories of childhood, and current events, he filters these references through an exploratory realm of feelings, loneliness and rebelliousness especially, which span autobiographical as well as broader cultural sensibilities

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

At the cornerstone of his exhibition Nara present “Pinacoteca 2021”, a new multi-room installation that is reworked from an earlier project titled “London Mayfair House” which Nara built from abandoned materials found in a London suburb in 2006. One of only 15 in existence, seven of which are in public collections, this installation offers a rare insight into the artist’s radically multidisciplinary, experiential practice. Borrowing its title from the Ancient Greco-Roman term for a public art salon, “Pinacoteca 2021”, is a specially crafted multi-room structure that imitates an exhibition space. Since 1985, Nara’s practice has explored the relationship between space and artwork. In 2001 he created an installation that resembled his student room, in which he exhibited unframed drawings by pinning them directly on the walls as if just completed, bringing the viewer into his inner world. Between 2003 and 2010, Nara made several spatial installations, often using found materials and personal affects alongside artworks to build and compose his structures.Visitors are invited to enter “Pinacoteca 2021” and experience the work from within as a gallery of paintings. Nara has meticulously designed every facet of the space to evoke a strong sense of place and emotion and create connections between viewer and environment. On the internal walls, newly created paintings on wood and canvas as well as drawings on paper, used envelopes, and cardboard boxes, are hung by the artist himself. Adorning the outside walls – which have been directly painted onto – Nara hangs new paintings on wood which are stylistically simpler and more graphic than the works inside the installation. Sightlines from outside the structure have been carefully constructed through wooden slats and windows, deftly shifting the viewer’s position from participant to onlooker as they enter and exit the space. For more than three decades, Nara’s idiosyncratic visual language has centred on innocent, genderless figures often rendered in bright colours with large heads and oval eyes. Drawing on a multitude of sources, including politics, punk rock and folk music, and the counterculture of the 1960s, Nara’s iconic figures function as a kind of self-portrait. Working alone, Nara channels his inner world through these unusual and brazen figures, whose expressions range from indignant and rebellious to despondent. Particular attention is paid to the materiality of his work. Nara’s paintings on cardboard such retain the exposed raw edges, leaving old barcodes and shipping text visible as part of the painting’s composition. “Peace Head” (2020) and “Ennui Head” (2020), two new bronze sculptures covered in a white urethane coating, began as small palm sized works in clay before being enlarged and cast. Melding the physical, natural world with portraiture, these sculptures have a shared sensibility with his graphite drawings in their use of shadow and line.

Photo: Left: Yoshitomo Nara, 1.2.3.4., Change the History, 2007, acrylic on wood, 74-7/16″ × 55-1/2″ × 3-1/8″, © Yoshitomo Nara, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Right: Yoshitomo Nara, STOP THE BOMBS, 2019, acrylic on wood, 58-7/8 x 46-1/4 x 3-1/16″ © Yoshitomo Nara, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 26/11/2021-15/1/2022,  Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 by appointment only (book here), www.pacegallery.com