Name: Untitled
Brand: Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959)
Price: 17000.00 GBP
Availability: SoldOut

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959)
Untitled
coloured pencil and graphite on envelope
7½ x 5¾in. (19 x 14.6cm.)
Executed in 2002

Provenance:
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature:
N. Miyamura and S. Suzuki (eds.), Yoshitomo Nara: the Complete Works, Volume 2: Works on Paper, San Francisco 2011, no. D-2002-161z (illustrated in colour, pp. 191 and 373).

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Lot Essay

‘We think we know who Yoshimoto Nara is. We see his images of destructive yet endearing girls everywhere it seems, on T-Shirts and ashtrays and as figurines. Yet these cute objects are only one dimension of Nara’s body of work […] central to all of his works is an emotional intensity that conveys recurring feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and rebellion, embodied in the solitary figures of girls wielding knives or sad puppy dogs’ (M. Chiu, ’Preface’, in Yoshimoto Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2010).

Arguably one of the most influential Japanese Pop artists of the 1990s, Yoshimoto Nara is known best for his stylized wide-eyed children whose dark undertones subvert their seeming innocence. Love Is Over appears at first to be a child’s innocent notebook doodling, yet the message itself suggests a distinctly adult nihilism. Produced using pencil on found envelope, Nara scribbles over the words ‘JAPAN’, leaving a central New York address visible. This draws out the social and cultural aspects in Nara’s work, the frustrations of which are often latent in the deceptive simplicity of his work.