Although his works may look like cartoons, they aren’t priced like it – in 2019, Sotheby's set an incredible new record for Yoshitomo Nara, selling Knife Behind Back, a large acrylic on canvas from 2000, for $24.9 million.
At first glance, the painting looks like an anime-style girl in a red dress. However, she is set apart by a decidedly angry expression. The title makes her lose any last semblance of child-like vulnerability, allowing the viewer to easily imagine the weapon she hides behind her back.
The invisible knife hidden behind the angry child creates an iconic vision, done in a completely contemporary style that still references the actions of knife-bearing women in the classical world, such as Lucretia committing suicide or Judith beheading Holofernes.
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Yoshitomo Nara was born in Hirosaki, Japan, in 1959. His artistic debut took place in the nineties when Japanese pop art began to carve out an important space in the contemporary art scene. Nara's imagery is based on the tension between perceived innocence and the harm it may be capable of. He most often depicts children, sometimes holding (or hiding) knives, saws, and other weapons. They often look angry or accusatory, but their look of hatred does not make them aggressors – rather, Nara wants to threaten those who attack the innocence of childhood.
Nara's work, which includes painting, sculpture, ceramics and installations, is influenced not only by Eastern pop culture but also Western – the first years of his career are linked to his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf during the 1980s, where he was under the guidance of A.R. Penck. In the 2000s, Nara returned to Japan and began dedicating himself to large-scale works on canvas, where his typical figures gradually humanized, in some cases even losing their weapons: the works from these years convey a certain maturity and acceptance of his status as an outsider with respect to the world around him.
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In 2011, Nara was deeply troubled by the Fukushima earthquake and the terrible consequences that ensued, so much so that he was temporarily unable to work. In those same years his reputation outside of Asia was rapidly growing: the year before, the Asia Society of New York hosted the exhibition Yoshitomo Nara, Nobody's Fool in conjunction with MoMA in New York and MoCA in Los Angeles. In 2020, LACMA in Los Angeles hosted a retrospective of Nara with over 100 artworks.
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Today, Nara continues to work in his two studios, dividing his time between Germany and Japan. He dedicates himself to a great variety of techniques and materials, but he tries to maintain a low profile and concentrates fully on his art. His artworks regularly fetch multimillion dollar prices on the auction market. Though his $24.9 million record from 2019 hasn't been broken yet, collectors are still intrigued by paintings of his wide-eyed figures that tread the cusp between vulnerable and malicious. Most recently, No Means No sold at Phillips Hong Kong in October 2023 for $8.3 million.
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This is an updated version of the article originally published on October 10, 2019
