“My student life in Germany taught me about much more than the small world that is art. It allowed me to learn about how to be a human being in a much larger sense.”
— Yoshitomo NaraIn 1988, Yoshitomo Nara decided to depart from Japan for Germany. The then young artist found himself somehow disconnected within the local art world, which was shifting towards a more commercialised practice in the 1980s. Seeking to continue his lifestyle as a student away from society, Nara pursued further studies at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The following four years, until 1992, are among the most critical periods that saw the formation of what we recognise today as Nara’s signature mannerism—one imbued with a childlike simplicity, mixing rebellious rawness with touching sentiments, while juggling a light-hearted innocence and a profound emotional intensity.
Coming from a Distinguished European Collection and fresh to auction, the current lot is a compelling exemplar created with the new artistic vocabulary Nara developed just before the turn of millennium. Here, one can observe some of the prototypical techniques that would later characterise the artist's iconic works. A painting on canvas executed with oil, the work showcases a playful and sketch-like quality, made all the more captivating with its simplified narrative configuration and pared-down use of colour, countered by the amplified presence of lines. The outline of a boy figure is drawn out with bold, unpolished black strokes, situated within an abstracted backdrop composed of uneven brushwork that injects the work with a mystical deep purple, interlaced with hints of yellow and pink.
In Düsseldorf, Nara studied under the mentorship of A.R. Penck. A representative artist of German Neo-Expressionism, Penck has been known for his stylistic compositions featuring simplified patterns and signs, executed in childlike bold lines, which yet encompassed an explosive energy responding to the aftermath of wars and the collapsing order of the post-war era. It was on the advice of Penck that Nara conceived the idea to incorporate in painting a more improvisational sensibility seen more often in his drawings, which are often humorous and spontaneous musings created on either random scraps from notebooks or found posters. Transplanting the approach of drawing onto the canvas, Nara was able to release this playful and rebellious facet within his artistic persona, through deliberate imperfection and incompleteness that disregarded expectations for technical refinedness and so-called maturity.
A.R. Penck, West, 1980
Artwork: © 2024 A. R. Penck / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany
Loneliness is another keyword that Nara frequently uses in his memories to refer to his German sojourn. As Nara reflects, ‘I ended up living in Germany for 12 years. I became literally “alone” there. It strongly reminded me of the memory of my lonely childhood. I felt the city’s (Düsseldorf) cold and darkness, just like my hometown, and the atmosphere there reinforced my tendency to seclude myself from the outer world.’ i As a foreign student confronting various language and cultural barriers, Nara was compelled to turn further inward and explore deeply his solitary inner world. A result of this, as one would observe in his work, are the gradual elimination of rich details in the backgrounds seen in his earliest works, which narrowed to increasingly flat and neutral settings, composed of decontextualised colour fields. These shifts in turn invite the viewer to concentrate more on Nara’s characters and their fluctuating emotional states.Also foregrounded in the current lot is the motif of a little ship, which is held high in the hand of the boy. Unlike many other enigmatic symbols that imbue Nara’s work with a touch of ambiguity, the ship is a highly recognisable mark that registers intensely with the artist’s sensation, embodying a strong sense of nostalgia for his distant home in Japan. A more straightforward manifestation of this theme can be seen in an earlier painting from 1991, where Nara depicts a child holding a ship on his head, and which he directly titles Homesick with a ship. From 1991 to 1992, Nara repeatedly explored various expressions with the motif, rendering his characters as either holding, playing with or gazing silently at varying ships. Including the current lot, these fourteen works form a significant corpus, acting as the strongest and deepest emotional outlet of Nara at this moment in time.
“I don’t paint when I am happy. I only paint when I am angry, lonely, sad, when I am able to talk to the work. So there is a need for storytelling before I paint.”
— Yoshitomo NaraProvenance
Gallery Loft, Devente
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1992Exhibited
Deventer, Loft Gallery, NARA, Yoshitomo, 1 January - 2 February 1992
Literature
Noriko Miyamura and Shinko Suzuki, eds., Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works Volume 1: Paintings, Sculptures, Editions, Photographs 1984-2010, Tokyo, 2011, no. P-1992-002, p. 80 (illustrated)
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION
125
Untitled
signed, inscribed and dated 'Yoshitomo Nara '92' on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
84 x 100 cm. (33 1/8 x 39 3/8 in.)
Painted in 1992, this work is registered in the Yoshitomo Nara Online Catalogue Raisonné under registration number YNF817.
Estimate
HK$4,800,000 - 6,800,000
€584,000-827,000
$615,000-872,000
Sold for HK$4,318,000
Charlotte Raybaud
Client Advisory Director
charlotteraybaud@phillips.com
+852 2318 2058
+44 7833 471 016
Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale
Hong Kong Auction 26 November 2024
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