Yoshitomo Nara - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 12, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna

  • Catalogue Essay


    One of the most prolific artists to emerge from the Japanese Pop movement of the 1990s, artist Yoshitomo Nara’s oeuvre includes thematic traits derived from Japanese anime cartoons and manga comics, imbued with a palpable sense of punk rock nihilism and defiance wrapped around the uniquely Japanese phenomenon of kawaii (cute) and otaku cultures: “Hello Kitty channeling the Sex Pistols,” (I. Schaffner, Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, Cleveland, 2003).
    Nara’s body of work explores the simultaneously liberating and terrifying world of childhood imagination as he has fashioned a universe populated by little girls whose insolent stances and expressions of thinly veiled malice belie their inherent cuteness; big-eyed and pigtailed, foulmouthed chain-smoking representatives of the inherent rebelliousness of youth and adolescence.
    Black Hole Cosmic Heads, touches on some of Nara’s darker themes. His iconic little girls reappear in the present lot, at least in part— their disembodied heads, cast in black plastic, float on the surface of a dark, reflective pool. Suggestive of a spinning tidal pool or, as the name suggests, a black hole, the work induces a sense of muted dread; it touches the nerve of our collective infantile memories of the universe as overwhelmingly infinite and dangerously prodigious.

26

Black Hole Cosmic Heads

2004

Lacquer and fiberglass-reinforced plastic in two parts.

Main disc: 82 5/8 x 82 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. (209.9 x 209.9 x 60 cm); single head: 19 x 12 x 12 in. (48.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm).


Signed and dated “Nara 2004” on the reverse. This work is unique from a series of six similar works.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $134,500

Contemporary Art Part I

12 Nov 2009
New York