Jonas Wood in his studio

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Wood has one foot in Modernist cool and the other in vibrant Pop Art.
\n— Linda Yablonsky, New York Times Style Magazine
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In the artist's own words, as quoted in Jennifer Samet's "Beer with a Painter, LA Edition: Jonas Wood" for Hyperallergic in September 2015, "My forms are not rendered spatially. My paintings of tennis courts were about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle. There also is text, because of the advertising.

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"My work is under-painted with big flat shapes of colour; that is how they start. They are generated from an abundance of flat planes built up on top of each other."

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Jonas Wood Wimbledon I, 2011

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Jonas Wood's oeuvre is most notable for his reconsideration of the golden era of 20th Century American painting, drawing fine comparisons to artists such as Edward Hopper. Drawing inspiration from quotidian life, Wood creates bold works that distill and deconstruct the very meaning of the world around him, his subjects ranging from basketball players and tennis courts to living rooms. Condensing what he sees, Wood's compact images are rendered in coloured blocks, "in a flat, Pop way," not unlike those seen on sports cards — visual prompts which the artist has noted as important.

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Jonas Wood Mini French Open, 2012

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In spite of this, however, the artist's works are far from two-dimensional. The seemingly simple final images that we see in Wood's works are constructed atop many layers and flat planes, and in the case of pieces such as Mini French Open from our 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale, the final result is a heightened version of reality, where images almost exist in a complete vacuum, stripped of original context.

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With its striking primary colours, Mini French Open engages with a tennis court's inherent geometry to create a trompe-l'oeil of sorts, where depth has been erased entirely, leaving the audience with an esoteric tennis court, uncanny yet unquestionably familiar.

\n","publishDate","2017-05-23T15:33:37.000000Z","coverPosX","coverPosY","articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/12806936/pop-meets-modernism-jonas-woods-tennis-courts","auctionEditorialID",139,"editorialID",150,"flocklerID",12806936,{"_1827":1848,"_1829":241,"_1830":1849,"_1796":1850,"_1833":1851,"_1835":1852,"_1837":1639,"_1838":481,"_1839":1853,"_474":239,"_1841":1854,"_1843":1855,"_1845":1856},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/11_002--93lxoogxfr_s600x0.jpg","The lead lot from our Evening Sale in Hong Kong characterizes the Japanese artist's mix of mysterious allure and 'kima-kawaii'.","Kitsch and Kawaii: Yoshitomo Nara's 'Last Warrior'","

Yoshitomo Nara Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier, 2000 (detail)

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Fortunately nowadays it's no longer forbidden to be into kitsch and kid's stuff, and only people who want to be 'very' grown up can’t relate to such things.
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— Yoshitomo Nara
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The girl in Yoshitomo Nara's Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier gazes at us with a fixed, determined stare that belies her age. The cutesy charm of this doll-like figure is undercut by her downturned mouth, pursed lips, clenched fist and frowning eyes, fixing us viewers on her piercing gaze. She is shown at an angle that emphasises the act of a child looking up—and in this case, confronting her audience.

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With this steely attitude, the girl well deserves her title of Last Warrior. She also clearly deserves her place within the extensive cast of bellicose youths who have become so iconic in Nara's work, leading to his becoming one of the most celebrated Japanese artists of our age.

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\nDating from 2000, this picture perfectly demonstrates the intoxicating allure of Nara's paintings and subjects. This is a subversive sweetness, tapping into the kima-kawaii wave that had emerged in the 1990s, shortly before Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier was painted. Kima-kawaii is cuteness with an edge, often with a hint of either ugliness or, as here, violence. In Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier, it simmers beneath the surface, percolating through the girl's rigid glare.
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\nLast Warrior / The Unknown Soldier was painted at a pivotal point in Nara's career, when his engaging paintings of subversively adult children were garnering him increasing international attention and acclaim. Only the previous year, his images had been used for a book by the celebrated author Banana Yoshimoto, as well as on album covers. In 2000, he was granted his first one-man show at an American museum, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was also in 2000 that Nara moved away from Cologne in Germany, which had been his base since 1988.

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Kima-kawaii is cuteness with an edge, often with a hint of either ugliness or, as here, violence.
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Yoshitomo Nara Missing in Action, 2000. Sold at Phillips, London, 14 October 2015 for £1,986,500 (HK$ 19,865,000) against a pre-auction estimate of £700,000 – 1,000,000. At the time of the auction, this represented a world auction record for the artist.

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The artist's time studying and then teaching art in Germany—in Western Europe, rather than Japan—is evident in the sheer craft and skill that have gone into making Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier, as a closer inspection of its surface will attest. While the visual language of Nara's paintings mimics anime, manga and children's illustrations, explaining why he is so often associated with Japanese Neo Pop, Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier and many of its sister-pictures are painstakingly created using layers of oil on canvas in techniques that echo those of the Old Masters and 20th-century painters. The essentially monochrome background of Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier is deliberately made to resemble a sheet of paper left in reserve, or a page, the figure floating against it. At the same time, it fills the picture with a luminosity that recalls European frescoes painted in tempera on plaster.

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The figure itself has been rendered with an eloquent economy of means, deliberately mimicking the appearance of print media and cartoons despite the sheer effort that has gone into painting it. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nara insists on this direct involvement with his pictures, employing no studio assistants, but instead painting with a single-minded determination.
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\nThis reveals the wide panoply of influences at work in Nara's pictures. While manga, anime, The Little Prince and Disney may be more obvious references, Nara is also touching upon the history of art in both the East and the West—and of course their crossover. After all, born in the 1950s, Nara was raised in a Japan that had been flooded with Western, and particularly American, culture, and which had responded by assimilating elements of it, co-opting it to its own purposes, for instance in anime series such as Speed Racer. Nara himself has discussed how his upbringing in a rural area of Northern Japan had an influence in the way that he responded to all these influences. As quoted in Stephan Trescher's 'My Superficiality Is Only a Game: A Conversation between Stephan Trescher and Yoshitomo Nara', the artist explained, "In the area I'm from there was no museum — and there still isn't. I received my visual stimuli more from television, from Japanese and American comic books, and from European children's books. That's why comic books have a greater reality for me than the European painting that I later came to know and study intensively."

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Yoshitomo Nara Missing in Action, 2005. Sold at Phillips, London, 8 March 2017 for £1,445,000.

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Likewise, punk and folk music would have an impact on Nara — the girl's pose and haircut in Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier recalls pictures of the Ramones, the band he revered.
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\nDuring his childhood, Nara was largely isolated and left to his own devices. The solitude and independence he experienced have filtered into his pictures of defiant girls shown smoking, holding weapons or scowling as in Last Warrior / The Unknown Soldier.

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After all, as he explained in a 2006 interview with kultureflash, "They are all self-portraits in a way. But the emotions that I feel can, of course, be universal."

\n","2017-05-18T16:04:50.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/12533634/kitsch-kawaii-yoshitomo-nara",133,144,12533634,{"_1827":1858,"_1829":241,"_1830":1859,"_1796":1860,"_1833":1861,"_1835":1862,"_1837":1639,"_1838":481,"_1839":1863,"_474":397,"_1841":1864,"_1843":1865,"_1845":1866},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/13_002--23j5iquu46_s600x0.jpg","Reappropriated from a motorcycle ad and inspired by Marlon Brando, an unusually large and monochrome Andy Warhol painting evokes wit, subculture and consumerism.","Freedom and Rebellion: Riding Warhol's Motorbike","

Andy Warhol Mineola Motorcycle (positive), 1985-96 (detail). Dynthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas. Stamped by The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board.

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Standing almost two metres tall, Andy Warhol's Mineola Motorcycle (positive) is one of the largest paintings of his oeuvre. Rendered by hand in stark black on white, this motorbike ad has been granted the glamour of monumentality, appearing on a bill-board scale.

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By appropriating an advertisement, Warhol is exploring the type of ephemeral imagery that he had immortalised, turning them into the cornerstones of Pop Art. The restrained palette adds an emphatic dynamism to the image, the black paint on its luminous white background lending it an incredible visual impact that slyly recalls the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Franz Kline.

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The theme of the motorbike was perfect for Warhol, tied up as it was with notions of freedom and rebellion...
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Andy Warhol Marlon, 1966. Silkscreen on canvas. Private collection. Private Collection/Bridgeman Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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When Mineola Motorcycle (positive) was created around 1985-1986, Warhol had returned to some of the themes and techniques that he had employed to such success at the beginning of his career. The motorcycle can be seen as a reference to the silkscreens of Marlon Brando he had created during the 1960s, taking an iconic still from The Wild One that shows the star kitted out as a biker. In terms of techniques, Warhol used projectors to show images on a picture surface which he would then paint by hand, echoing the way he had painted his original Coca-Cola Bottles and Campbell's Soup Cans.

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This hands-on technique also reflected a new interest in the painterly that was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the mid-1980s, Basquiat and Warhol created paintings in which each artist added their own elements. As Warhol would comment at the time, in a diary entry from 16 September 1984, "Jean Michel got me into painting differently, so that's a good thing" (The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, New York, 1989).
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\nWarhol's use of this hands-on technique came to prominence in what was to be one of his final great series — The Last Supper. Based on Leonardo's celebrated mural in Milan, these pictures were created using a range of techniques, including several that were hand-painted as Mineola Motorcycle (positive) had been. Indeed, in one of Warhol's largest paintings, The Last Supper (The Big C) from around 1985, now in the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the titular feast is punctuated by images of the same ad that served as the basis of Mineola Motorcycle (positive). "I painted them all by hand—I myself," Warhol explained of the related Last Supper works, as quoted in J.D. Ketner, II's Andy Warhol: The Last Decade. "That's why the project took so long."

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The theme of the motorbike was perfect for Warhol, tied up as it was with notions of freedom and rebellion, as encapsulated in Brando's movie. At the same time, Warhol was also keenly aware of the subculture that had grown around the biker look, for instance in the gay scene explored in Kenneth Anger's 1963 film Scorpio Rising. It was the sheer multiplicity of meaning of the image of the biker that doubtless appealed to Warhol. In Mineola Motorcycle (positive), this is underscored by the fact that we are looking at an ad—the notion of the biker rebels roaming the roads is playfully deflated by the declaration that credit cards are accepted.

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In Mineola Motorcycle (positive), as in so many of his most iconic Pop paintings, Warhol has managed to create a picture that invokes wit, subcultures and aesthetics, as well as the consumer culture that so fascinated him.

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\n","2017-05-24T18:25:18.000000Z","https://www.phillips.com/article/12860288/warhol-title-tk",140,151,12860288,{"_1827":1868,"_1829":99,"_1830":1869,"_1796":1870,"_1833":1871,"_1835":1872,"_1837":1639,"_1838":481,"_1839":1873,"_474":108,"_1841":1874,"_1843":1875,"_1845":1876},"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/33_001_s600x0.jpg","Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, London, speaks about the 'Miss Blanche' chair, in which rose petals are gracefully suspended in acrylic, as a cornerstone of Kuramata's legacy.","Floating Petals: Shiro Kuramata's Postmodern Japan","

Shiro Kuramata 'Miss Blanche' chair, designed 1988.

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The 20th-century dream has been to 'go even faster,' but, in the next century, [I] think this will be to 'float even more.'
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— Shiro Kuramata
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Shiro Kuramata was one of the greatest designers of the 20th century. A brilliant and complex talent, he helped push modern Japan into becoming a renowned exporter of creativity, grace and technique. Kuramata designed a series of remarkably beautiful interiors, almost all of them now destroyed. His furniture has survived and serves as his principle legacy. It is the 'Miss Blanche' chair that most powerfully embodies his poetic approach to design. It combines an unnerving kind of beauty, a strong narrative, and a commitment to the craft values of making.
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\nNamed after the central character in the famed play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois, the chair resonates with the idea of her tragic beauty, shelled in dreamlike delusion. It is impossible not to be touched by the serene seeming beauty of a graceful transparent object, in which roses float in air, held in place by nothing tangible. The chair seems effortless. However, the craftsmanship behind the creation of the chair was so demanding that many of the craftsmen were reluctant ever to work with Kuramata afterwards.

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\nWorking through trial and error, Kuramata's craftsmen found that pouring liquid acrylic resin to various heights of the mould, then dropping in the flowers, waiting eight hours for the acrylic to harden, and subsequently repeating this created the best effect. The roses needed to be held in position with tweezers until the resin hardened enough to ensure that they did not sink. Care was taken to make sure there was a good spread of flowers throughout the mould, and that they made a good pattern. The first batch of rose-studded acrylic sheet yielded just eight useable chairs, with one failure.
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\nA total of 56 'Miss Blanche' chairs have been produced over the years — a number that reflects Kuramata's age at the time of his death. Kuramata experimented with real roses and expensive artificial flowers, but cheap acrylic flowers turned out to work best in retaining colour and shape.

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A work by a close friend and pivotal design influence: Ettore Sottsass 'Large fruit stand', 2001

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Three crucial relationships demonstrate the significant influence that Kuramata has left in the world of design. Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, who still collects his work, commissioned him to design some of his most beautiful shops. Kuramata was also a close friend of Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, who later invited Kuramata to join the Memphis Group that Ettore founded in 1981. British architectural designer John Pawson was so inspired by the experience of working in Kuramata's studio in Japan that he returned to England and eventually began his own practice in 1981.

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The 'Miss Blanche' is included in the following important and international museum collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; DMA, Dallas; M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

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Yoshitomo Nara

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Yoshitomo Nara