Yoshitomo Nara (1959) Yoshitomo Nara’s deceptively simple paintings, sculptures, and drawings draw on the pop culture aesthetics of manga, Walt Disney cartoons, and punk rock. The artist populates his work with alternately adorable and sinister child characters, who run amok in flat backgrounds rendered with simple bold lines and solid hues.
Nara explores imagination and the individual, and his more complex canvases consider the intersection of figure and ground. Nara received his MFA from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music and has exhibited in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and beyond. His work belongs to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Rubell Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, the Long Museum, the Aomori Museum of Art, and many other collections. Nara’s paintings have sold for seven figures on the secondary market.