Image : Yoshitomo Nara in his studio, 2026. Photograph: Keita Saiki. Artwork: Yoshitomo Nara
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David Zwirner will present an exhibition of work by Yoshitomo Nara across its galleries at 537 West 20th Street and 533 West 19th Street in New York from November 5 to December 12, 2026. According to the gallery, it is the artist's first solo exhibition with David Zwirner and his first major solo show in New York in nearly a decade. It brings together new paintings and drawings, recent sculpture and early works chosen by Nara himself, among them foundational pieces from the 1980s.
Born in 1959, Nara has worked across many media since the mid-1980s. The gallery traces his visual language to a solitary childhood in rural northern Japan, where nature, folklore and children's stories were early influences, and to his discovery of popular music through a radio he built himself. His wide-eyed, large-headed figures, which he regards as self-portraits, were read by critics in the 1990s as raw emotion akin to punk and rock; viewers today often see their own feelings reflected in them.
At 20th Street, a new group of front-facing canvas portraits from 2026 shows a turn toward more muted color and softer, more diffused brushwork. Other paintings use a new method in which the composition is drawn in colored pencil and then layered with translucent acrylic washes, with figures shown in relaxed poses and eyes filled with tears. These are joined by large monochrome drawings made with industrial oil-based paint sticks and by "line" paintings, in which bold notebook sketches are projected onto canvas and repainted to keep the speed of the original drawing.
At 19th Street, the gallery is showing thirteen sculptures from 2024, each a tenfold enlargement of a palm-sized clay head. Cast in bronze and coated in matte white urethane, they recall the snow "monsters" Nara knew from the winters of his childhood.
The exhibition coincides with "Yoshitomo Nara: Sentinels of Stillness" at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, where three heads enlarged sixteen times inaugurate the Annual West Lawn Series through November 7, 2027.
