‘Nara, Dreaming of a Lost Girlhood, Finds New Freedom in Color’ by Deborah Solomon
2026
Yoshitomo Nara, an obsessive recorder of Japanese girlhood, might seem hard to separate from commerce. His solitary figures, with their widely spaced eyes and teenage-diary emotions, have been multiplying steadily across the surfaces of posters, phone cases, lampshades, skateboards and, at the Museum of Modern Art gift shop, adhesive bandages — a reminder of the artist’s enormous popular reach.
The sprawling Nara exhibition opening Thursday at David Zwirner’s two galleries in Chelsea is the reintroduction to his work you didn’t know you needed. In truth, the mounds of sleek merch surrounding Nara have distorted his achievement and concealed what makes his work interesting, in particular his feeling for paper.
Read more at The New York Times.
