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Auction archive: Lot number Ο15

Yoshitomo Nara

Estimate
£500,000 - £700,000
ca. US$648,176 - US$907,446
Price realised:
£504,000
ca. US$653,361
Auction archive: Lot number Ο15

Yoshitomo Nara

Estimate
£500,000 - £700,000
ca. US$648,176 - US$907,446
Price realised:
£504,000
ca. US$653,361
Beschreibung:

Ο15Yoshitomo NaraMagic Carpetcolour pencil on paper laid on canvas mounted on wood 162 x 162 cm (63 3/4 x 63 3/4 in.) Executed in 2012. Full CataloguingEstimate £500,000 - 700,000 Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
Overview'Painting is something more objective and controlled, while drawing is more intimate, uncontrolled and raw. Some drawings may be a little naïve. Drawings show what’s inside.' —Yoshitomo Nara Executed in 2012, Magic Carpet is one of the largest works on paper produced by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara Evincing exquisite linework and thorough detail, the composition depicts a child surfing through celestial realms on a loosely delineated flying carpet, her hands manifesting a cartoonish constellation of stars. Above the young protagonist’s crouched silhouette hovers a rhythmic expression reading ‘Hey Hey, My Friends, Fuck ‘Bout Centralizationism’, and just below her feet can be deciphered the discreet peak of a mountain, suggesting proximity to earthly grounds. Combining the whimsicality of the child’s likeness with grown-up, politicised language, Nara locates the artistic intention of Margic Carpet in a characteristically polyvalent realm, straddling innocence and cynicism, childhood purity and adult conscientiousness. This is perhaps the artist’s most renowned and celebrated trademark: the paradoxical union of an innocuous appearance with subtle undercurrents of tension and unease, overall embodied by the enduring motif of a solitary, mischievous child. Quintessentially kowa kawaii (‘scary cute’), Nara’s faux naïve aesthetic fuses impressions of anime and manga cartoons that he read as a child, and traditional Japanese otafuku and okame theatrical masks. Further testament to its importance in the artist’s wider oeuvre, Magic Carpet was included in his major survey Greetings from a Place in my Heart, which took place at the Dairy Art Centre in London at the end of 2014, and remains his largest and most comprehensive show to date in the United Kingdom. Yoshitomo Nara’s Cantankerous Kids Yoshimoto Nara, Frog Girl, 1998, oil on canvas, Private Collection. Image: London/Scala, Florence. Exploring the psychological universe of childhood experience, Nara’s work straddles infantile imagination, adult anxiety, and ageless rebellion. The artist began developing this thematic aesthetic following his graduation from the Aichi University of the Arts, when he moved to Germany and undertook a six-year artistic apprenticeship at Düsseldorf’s Staatliche Kunstakademie under the mentorship of the Neo-Expressionist painter A.R. Penck. Language barriers in Germany had plunged Nara back into a period of acute solitude which he had not experienced since his childhood. Seeking relief, the artist began plumbing the depths of his subconscious through art, manifesting his profound sense of alienation through proliferating illustrations of sulky children. ‘These paintings all featured the single image of a girl or sexually ambiguous child with a large head and piercing eyes, involved in situations of predicament or solitude’, wrote Midori Matsui.i Beneath their luminous, almost comical faces lied a spirit of mutinous, naïve defiance; in other instances they betrayed a distinctly adolescent sense of angst and melancholy. Nara would remember this period of introspection as formative, restoring a ‘sense of [his] true self’ that he had almost forgotten.ii A mature example of Nara’s exquisite draftsmanship, Magic Carpet prodigiously illustrates the artist’s mental blend of tenderness, melancholy and mischief; three cornerstone states that defined the elaboration of his disarming – and now iconic – visual language. 'If Murakami is Japan’s Warhol, impersonal and deadpan, then Nara is its Keith Haring sincere and expressive.' —Sarah BoxerDescribing Nara’s artistic process, the curator Kristin Chambers said, ‘Nara works alone in his studio, usually late at night, with punk rock screaming from speakers. He chain-smokes as he concentrates on channeling all of his past ghosts and present emotions into the deceptively simple face of his current subject. Each painting—each figure—is typically executed in the span of one night, capturing both a range of e

Auction archive: Lot number Ο15
Auction:
Datum:
20 Oct 2020
Auction house:
Phillips
null
Beschreibung:

Ο15Yoshitomo NaraMagic Carpetcolour pencil on paper laid on canvas mounted on wood 162 x 162 cm (63 3/4 x 63 3/4 in.) Executed in 2012. Full CataloguingEstimate £500,000 - 700,000 Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
Overview'Painting is something more objective and controlled, while drawing is more intimate, uncontrolled and raw. Some drawings may be a little naïve. Drawings show what’s inside.' —Yoshitomo Nara Executed in 2012, Magic Carpet is one of the largest works on paper produced by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara Evincing exquisite linework and thorough detail, the composition depicts a child surfing through celestial realms on a loosely delineated flying carpet, her hands manifesting a cartoonish constellation of stars. Above the young protagonist’s crouched silhouette hovers a rhythmic expression reading ‘Hey Hey, My Friends, Fuck ‘Bout Centralizationism’, and just below her feet can be deciphered the discreet peak of a mountain, suggesting proximity to earthly grounds. Combining the whimsicality of the child’s likeness with grown-up, politicised language, Nara locates the artistic intention of Margic Carpet in a characteristically polyvalent realm, straddling innocence and cynicism, childhood purity and adult conscientiousness. This is perhaps the artist’s most renowned and celebrated trademark: the paradoxical union of an innocuous appearance with subtle undercurrents of tension and unease, overall embodied by the enduring motif of a solitary, mischievous child. Quintessentially kowa kawaii (‘scary cute’), Nara’s faux naïve aesthetic fuses impressions of anime and manga cartoons that he read as a child, and traditional Japanese otafuku and okame theatrical masks. Further testament to its importance in the artist’s wider oeuvre, Magic Carpet was included in his major survey Greetings from a Place in my Heart, which took place at the Dairy Art Centre in London at the end of 2014, and remains his largest and most comprehensive show to date in the United Kingdom. Yoshitomo Nara’s Cantankerous Kids Yoshimoto Nara, Frog Girl, 1998, oil on canvas, Private Collection. Image: London/Scala, Florence. Exploring the psychological universe of childhood experience, Nara’s work straddles infantile imagination, adult anxiety, and ageless rebellion. The artist began developing this thematic aesthetic following his graduation from the Aichi University of the Arts, when he moved to Germany and undertook a six-year artistic apprenticeship at Düsseldorf’s Staatliche Kunstakademie under the mentorship of the Neo-Expressionist painter A.R. Penck. Language barriers in Germany had plunged Nara back into a period of acute solitude which he had not experienced since his childhood. Seeking relief, the artist began plumbing the depths of his subconscious through art, manifesting his profound sense of alienation through proliferating illustrations of sulky children. ‘These paintings all featured the single image of a girl or sexually ambiguous child with a large head and piercing eyes, involved in situations of predicament or solitude’, wrote Midori Matsui.i Beneath their luminous, almost comical faces lied a spirit of mutinous, naïve defiance; in other instances they betrayed a distinctly adolescent sense of angst and melancholy. Nara would remember this period of introspection as formative, restoring a ‘sense of [his] true self’ that he had almost forgotten.ii A mature example of Nara’s exquisite draftsmanship, Magic Carpet prodigiously illustrates the artist’s mental blend of tenderness, melancholy and mischief; three cornerstone states that defined the elaboration of his disarming – and now iconic – visual language. 'If Murakami is Japan’s Warhol, impersonal and deadpan, then Nara is its Keith Haring sincere and expressive.' —Sarah BoxerDescribing Nara’s artistic process, the curator Kristin Chambers said, ‘Nara works alone in his studio, usually late at night, with punk rock screaming from speakers. He chain-smokes as he concentrates on channeling all of his past ghosts and present emotions into the deceptively simple face of his current subject. Each painting—each figure—is typically executed in the span of one night, capturing both a range of e

Auction archive: Lot number Ο15
Auction:
Datum:
20 Oct 2020
Auction house:
Phillips
null
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