Yoshitomo Nara - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna

  • Catalogue Essay

    One of the most influential artists to emerge from the Japanese Popmovement of the 1990s, painter, illustrator and sculptor Yoshitomo Nara’soeuvre injects the common traits of his Pop colleagues-graphic, colorfulSuperflat illustration style derived from influences of anime cartoons andmanga comics, a tendency toward pop cultural quotation and massproduction-with a palpable sense of punk rock nihilism and defiance: “HelloKitty channeling the Sex Pistols,” (I. Schaffner, Idle Reflections: OnYoshitomo Nara’s Japanese Pop Art,Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens,Cleveland, 2003). Nara’s art explores the simultaneously liberating andterrifying world of the childhood imaginary as he has fashioned a universepopulated by little girls whose insolent stances and expressions of thinly veiledmalice belie their inherent cuteness; big-eyed and pigtailed, foulmouthedchainsmoking representatives of the inherent rebelliousness of thattime in our lives when we are too young to follow any rules.Black Hole Cosmic Heads, a sculpture from 2004, touches on some of Nara’sdarker themes. His little girls reappear here, at least in part-theirdisembodied heads, cast in black plastic, float on the surface of a pool ofreflective medium. Suggestive of a spinning tidal pool or, as the namesuggests, a black hole, the work induces a sense of muted dread; it touchesthe nerve of our collective infantile memories of the world as huge andunknowable, infinite and mysterious. While the slick glossiness of thesculpture is pure Pop, Nara’s thoughtful perversion of the cliché ofchildhood memories adds a layer of emotional depth the work of one ofluminaries of Superflat.

39

Black Hole Cosmic Heads

2004

Lacquer and fiberglass-reinforced plastic.

82 5/8 x 82 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. (209.9 x 209.9 x 60 cm).

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

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $265,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York