It would be disturbing without the title: a little/big girl, more than two meters high by another two meters wide, a portrait of a creature with very little breeding, glaring menacingly. The painting, Knife Behind Back, is shocking because somehow we know that the knife is there, even though it doesn’t appear in the painting, and that the girl will attack us as soon as we turn around, despite her young age. . Sorry, we feel it.
A tycoon paid 25 million dollars for this painting by Yoshitomo Nara at an auction in Hong Kong in 2019. The record for a Japanese artist, surpassing even Yayoi Kusama. The most expensive piece for sale in the entire MoMA store in the Chinese megapolis is a triptych of Miss Margaret (next to these lines), which costs around 800 euros. Fans will also find notebooks, 10 euros.
The works of Yoshitomo Nara (Japan, 1959) are recognizable even for those who do not visit museums. You will have seen his girls, the Nara Girls or Angry Girls, with big and ambivalent eyes on postcards, stickers, t-shirts, his large fan club is the envy of more than one celebrity and it was already viral before the virals.
All without being seen: he does not participate in marketing campaigns, he does not like the world of fashion, he does not lavish himself on interviews or exhibitions and he does not produce anything specific for those samples. He doesn’t create mysteries around him, nor does he suck up to the millionaires who collect his works. Yeah, a little punk. Or a lot.
From the windows of his house in the countryside in Tochigi Prefecture, he sees the countryside, the prairies, the forests, but no humans, as he confessed in an interview with The New York Times. It doesn’t bother him, or so he says: with his parents working and his older siblings already out of the home, he grew up as a classic key boy, arriving alone at a deserted house and spending the afternoons playing in an abandoned Army ammunition depot. Imperial Japanese, with Chako, a stray cat, as a companion. Self-taught, in an emotional sense.
He has no assistants and his studio was built by himself. Perhaps his companions are those expressive and also solitary girls who have cemented his success, isolated against a pastel background, without details that could give any clue. Only in some drawings other details and figures appear. He too was a child without a painted background.
Or maybe these girls are something else. self portraits. Perhaps the artist is not so satisfied with his autonomous growth. He leaves clues of this, like his story The little dog who wanted to have friends, published in our country by Barbara Fiore: the story of a very big dog, so big that nobody saw him, that’s why he felt very lonely and very sad, until a girl (a Nara Girl) finds out and they become friends.
In his native prefecture, Aomori, an American station broadcast Western music; At the age of eight, Nara spent all of his money on a record by the Japanese instrumental rock group Takeshi Terauchi and The Bunnys. He would later discover punk, its essence. Music organizes his work: when he comes to his studio at night, he first turns up the volume of his songs and then starts working without a preconceived plan, visualizations of what goes through his mind when he listens to music
The next chapter of his solitude was spent in Germany, where he moved in 1988 to study at the prestigious Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf at the end of the 80s. There, among his drawings, a big-headed girl appeared who was gaining more and more space, also in his paintings, also in the physical sense, until they occupy the entire canvas. He did not think of exhibiting, it was a gallery owner who discovered it and proposed it to him. In 1995 a show in Tokyo catapulted his creatures. Criticism surrendered to him. Money seems to be too.
The fever for his Nara Girls had been born, those children, mostly girls, with a candid appearance, even vulnerable, like something out of a comic, but who also arm themselves with knives or saws, who look with an expression in which, if one were to Look closely, discover a pure hatred. What have they done to them? Only the pets that he also paints are saved, truly innocent.
Rebellious girls, as punk as Nara himself, a pacifist and anti-nuclearist who reuses the paper on which he draws, who doesn’t relate to other artists, who sometimes transforms one of his Girls into Joey or Dee Dee Ramone, brandishing the guitar like a dagger. The paintings of him as shrapnel.
Yoshitomo Nara. All my little words. Albertine Modern. Vienna. www.albertina. at. From May 10 to November 1
