TOKYO.- Pace will host Robert Nava’s first solo show in Japan at its Tokyo gallery from February 19 through April 1, 2026. The presentation will feature new paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2023 and 2026, showcasing fantastical scenes of beauty and chaos that invite viewers to reconnect with the limitless imagination of their childhoods.

Nava’s works are populated by real and imagined creatures, angels, witches, and other beings rendered in energetic color. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Rendered at a range of scales, the works that the artist will show in Tokyo are at once inviting and unsettling, defying traditional standards of figurative and abstract painting with enigmatic passages of paint and pencil that land tantalizingly in-between.

A group of works on paper—created with different combinations of oil, acrylic, graphite, colored pencil, and crayon—will figure in the presentation, offering a glimpse into Nava’s robust drawing practice. “I usually begin every morning drawing in my sketchbooks, listening to music,” he has said. The relationship between his paintings and drawings is fluid: “The drawing impacts the painting, but it isn’t necessarily directly related every time.” In works like Diamond Sword (charged) (2024), sketch and brush stroke converge to form a malleable world in which a rabbit morphs into dragon amid a background of tactile washes of black.

This ambiguity, which characterizes all of Nava’s work, becomes deeper and more intense in his paintings. Not only is there a productive tension in his technique, but his subject matter, too, embraces dualities. “I’m sometimes at the edge where humor and tragedy collide,” Nava has said. In his artistic universe, benevolence and malevolence are constantly at odds with one another. In paintings such as Love Seal (2025) and Night Sky Leap Bunny (2025), vibrant colors—blues, reds, and greens—are juxtaposed with gestural applications of black and grey paint, as well as marks of luminous white and electric yellow.

Suit of water (Grease Evolution) (2024), another work on paper in the exhibition, depicts a dog-dragon hybrid that appears to carry off a two-headed goose. This composition, which recalls Bernini’s sculptures of abductions from Greek mythology, speaks to the artist’s enduring interest in the clash of innocence and experience. In creating new dimensions of his madcap world, Nava draws on a broad range of art historical and pop cultural inspirations, including the paintings of

Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Karel Appel, and Vincent van Gogh; classical myths and ancient art; horror and science fiction; video games; and cartoons such as Pokémon.

Nava’s first solo exhibition in Asia, Tornado Rose, was presented at Pace Seoul in 2023. His work can be found in the collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and other international institutions.

Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) earned a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University in 2008 as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2011. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad including Robert Nava, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (2018); Robert Nava: Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); Robert Nava, Pace Palm Beach (2021); Robert Nava: Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London (2022); Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Robert Nava: STAND, The Watermill Center, New York (2022); Robert Nava, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (2024); and Robert Nava: After Hours, Pace Gallery, New York (2025), among others. Nava’s work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d'Art Modern, Paris; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, among others.