Search results for ""Author Yoshitomo Nara""

Three decades of the beloved Japanese artist’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and more Yoshitomo Nara is among the most beloved Japanese artists of his generation. His widely recognizable portraits of menacing figures reflect the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self. Nara’s oeuvre takes inspiration from a wide range of resources—memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany (1988–2000), exploring his roots in Japan, Sakhalin and Asia, and modern art from Europe and Japan. Spanning 35 years (1985 to 2020), this book—which accompanies the major career retrospective organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—presents the full range of Nara’s work. It also examines the artist’s work through the lens of his longtime passion—music—and features “liner notes” written by the artist about various albums in his personal collection of 1960s and 70s folk and rock albums, published in English for the first time. The book features paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic figures, an installation that re-creates his drawing studio, and never-before-exhibited idea sketches that reflect the artist’s empathic eye, shining a light on Nara’s conceptual process. Readers will see the evolution of a dynamic artist who has become more contemplative with age. Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Aomori, Japan, and graduated with a master's degree from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music and later studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In the fall of 2010, the Asia Society in New York presented the first major New York exhibition of his work. He is represented by Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe.

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Recent works and a gorgeously crafted miniature gallery from the much-loved Japanese artist From the outset of his career, Japanese painter and sculptor Yoshitomo Nara (born 1959) has fruitfully explored the relationship between art and the space in which it is placed. At the cornerstone of Nara's recent exhibition in Pace's London gallery was the most recent product of his ongoing study: a new multiroom installation that was reworked from an earlier project titled London Mayfair House. Borrowing its title from the Ancient Greco-Roman term for a public art salon, Pinacoteca (2021) is a specially crafted, tiny, homelike structure that imitates an exhibition space. On the internal walls, the artist hung new paintings on wood and canvas as well as drawings on paper, used envelopes and cardboard boxes. On the external walls, which have been directly painted onto, Nara hung new paintings that are stylistically simpler and more graphic than the works inside the installation. Yoshitomo Nara: Pinacoteca presents a close look at the structure, as well as the artist’s recent paintings, sculpture and works on cardboard also displayed in the exhibition. An essay by acclaimed music writer Simon Reynolds explores the relationship of music to Nara’s artistic production, and an essay by curator Stephanie Rosenthal dives deep into the role of built environments in the artist's oeuvre.

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