GENEVA.- Pace will be presenting a survey of drawings by Yoshitomo Nara at its Geneva gallery. The exhibition marks the artists first-ever solo show in the Swiss city. Tracing more than three decades of his career, Yoshitomo Nara: The Bootleg Drawings 1988 2023 will bring together nearly 200 works on paper informed by politics, punk rock, folk music, and 1960s counterculture along with the artists own memories, childhood experiences, and his years spent living in Germany.
For his exhibition, Nara has culled a selection of never-before seen works which embraces somewhat raw and unfiltered sensibility. Individually, each drawing in the show sheds light on the artists aesthetic interests and approach to figuration at different points in his life. Together, these works present a holistic, deeply personal picture of his career through the lens of a singular medium.
Created in notebooks and on found materials ranging from corrugated cardboard to envelopes and newspapers, Naras spontaneous drawings featuring youthful figures, anthropomorphised animals, song lyrics, and expletives are fundamentally intimate reflections of his psychological landscape. In Naras hands, aesthetic signifiers of youthlike large heads and wide eyestap into complex emotions and psychic states, from rebellious and resistant to quiet, contemplative, and lonely.
The artist began doodling as a young child, practicing during classes, as he walked home from school, and at his childhood home in the semi-rural town of Hirosaki in northern Japan. Since Naras youth, music has been a hugely important force and influence in his work and life. Purchasing his first album at eight years old, he has always seen music as inextricable from his drawing process, with the sounds from his records transfiguring his ideas and feelings into images on the page.
The earliest drawings in Naras forthcoming exhibition with Pace in Geneva date to 1988, the year he moved to Germany to attend the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There, he studied under artist A.R. Penck, who encouraged Nara to combine his drawing and painting practicesan important moment in the development of his signature style. A selection of Naras bold figurations from 1989 on view in Paces exhibition reflect the violent rawness of Pencks work. In departing from gridded compositions of composite parts in favour of singular subjects and motifs set against flattened backgrounds, these works are preludes to a significant shift in the direction of Naras painting style a few years later: large, rounded heads against plain backgrounds.
In Naras expansive practicewhich encompasses painting, photography, large-scale installation, and sculpturedrawing is the medium through which he expresses his humour and introspective sensibilities most vividly. Interspersed with song lyrics and slogans, figurative images of skateboarders, mermaids, and guitar players speak to the artists personal, freewheeling musings. For Nara, drawing is a deeply personal act of refinement and experimentation when it comes to both ideas and technical processes.
Yoshitomo Nara: The Bootleg Drawings 1988 2023 will coincide with a major solo exhibition of Naras work at the Aomori Museum of Art in Japan, running from October 14, 2023 to February 25, 2024.
Pace
Yoshitomo Nara: The Bootleg Drawings 1988 2023
November 17th, 2023 February 29th, 2024