Yoshitomo Nara, the Japanese artist best known for paintings, prints, sculptures and merchandise featuring characters derived from the kawaii aesthetic of anime and manga, will now have his work represented by David Zwirner. The Manhattan-headquartered gallery, which also has locations in Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and Paris, will hold its first solo show with Nara at an unspecified future date in New York.
“I feel fortunate to present the works I will be creating under the guidance of a gallerist who, though born and raised in a different place, shares the same generation and the spirit of the era we both lived through—including its subcultures,” Nara said in a statement. “I am also aware that this good fortune rests upon the many layers of good fortune that have carried me this far.”
David Zwirner will collaborate with Nara’s international agent, a New York-based company called Equivalence Art Agency and founded by a man named Joe Baptista. The artist was previously represented by Pace Gallery for more than a decade. David Zwirner’s press release announcing Nara’s representation notes that “Pace Gallery will continue to have a relationship with the artist”.
“We are so proud of everything we have done for Yoshitomo Nara,” Marc Glimcher, Pace’s president, said in a statement shared with The Art Newspaper. “Looking back on our 14 years of working together, we would not do anything differently and as such this development is a little surprising, but we understand that in this environment things happen. We remain undying fans of the work and look forward to collaborating with the artist on future projects. We wish for a great relationship between him and David.”
Nara was born in Hirosaki in 1959 and received his BFA and MFA from Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts. He then moved to Germany and studied from 1988 to 1993 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his instructors included the Neo-Expressionist A.R. Penck. He subsequently lived for a period in Cologne before returning to Japan in 2000.
“I have been a fan of Yoshitomo Nara’s work since I first encountered it in my hometown, Cologne, in the early 1990s,” David Zwirner said in a statement. “Nara’s work seemed so radical to me then, as it ran counter to the postconceptual strategies that were pervasive in the art world at the time. Instead, Nara invited us to contemplate a world of vulnerability and genuine human connection. I soon found out that Nara and I did not just share formative years in Cologne, but also a deep love for music. To me, Nara’s work is not unlike a great song: personal, emotive, uncompromising and open to experimentation.”
Nara began showing at galleries in the 1980s and, by the end of the following decade, had been the subject of solo institutional exhibitions in Japan and the US, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Nagoya (in 1995) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (in 2000). In the decades since he has become one of the most famous, commercially successful and instantly recognisable contemporary artists in the world. His works are in the permanent collections of museums throughout Asia, Europe and North America. Recent solo exhibitions have included shows at the Albertina Modern in Vienna (in 2023), the Aomori Museum of Art (2023), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021), a travelling show that went to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum Frieder Burda and the Hayward Gallery (2024-25), and the Orange County Museum of Art (2025).
“Seeing Nara’s extensive and beautifully installed retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, earlier this year, was a true revelation,” Zwirner added. “Again, I was struck by Nara’s enormous generosity as an artist; he readily invites us into his inner universe, while challenging us to confront our own, reminding us that we have the right to resist. I am deeply honoured to welcome Yoshitomo Nara, one of the most important and authentic voices in contemporary culture, to the gallery.”
Nara’s paintings and sculptures are very sought-after in the primary and secondary markets, often fetching six- and seven-figure sums. Earlier this year the Los Angeles-based gallery Blum, shortly before it closed permanently, sold one of Nara’s monumental sculptures for $750,000 at Frieze Los Angeles. At auction, his prices have been known to reach much higher: the secondary-market record for Nara’s work was set at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong in 2019, when his large painting of a frowning female figure, Knife Behind Back (2000), sold for around four times its high estimate, or $24.9m. Since then, 12 more of his paintings have sold for eight-figure dollar sums at auction. Nara’s oeuvre also includes far more affordable limited edition collectibles and merchandise, which fuel a thriving resale market in the three- and four-figure price range.
