June 28–November 3, 2024
Bilbao 48001
Spain
Curator: Lucía Agirre
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Yoshitomo Nara, an exhibition sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, Strategic Trustee of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 1997. This retrospective exhibition reveals and explores the intriguing world of Yoshitomo Nara. It takes us on a journey through his evolving creativity from the origins of his ideas. Organized by theme, rather than chronologically or according to technique and materials, the exhibition offers an insight into Nara’s conceptual and formal processes. The broad selection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations made over the course of the last four decades—1984 to 2024—reflects his empathetic response to the people and places he has encountered over the years.
This is the first solo major exhibition of Nara’s work to be held in Spain and in a prominent European museum. The presentation was uniquely devised for the gallery space at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The exhibition will tour to Baden-Baden and London, where the display will be reconfigured in relation to each venue.
Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, Japan) is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His impressive images of children with large heads and big eyes—at times menacing, challenging, and defiant, but also melancholic and uncertain—are widely recognized.
Nara’s characters, his figures and animals, are a reflection of himself. They are a visual representation and a means of expression for his innermost thoughts and emotions. Childhood memories, his life experiences, his knowledge of music, art, and society, in Japan and abroad, are the sources of his creativity. Nara has a profound interest in humanity and his work examines and incorporates ideas surrounding concepts of home, community, nature, and their interconnectedness.
This survey exhibition is arranged thematically, according to Nara’s specifications. The motifs which recur in his work—including the red-roofed house, the sprouts, the puddle, the box, the blue boat, and the forest—reveal the continuity of thought he has maintained throughout his career, and they serve to highlight his stylistic development. Nara views himself as a painter, first and foremost, but he explores each theme within a range of other materials and formats—drawing, sculpture, and installation.
