David Zwirner, one of the world’s largest galleries, announced Monday that it would now be the official representative of artist Yoshitomo Nara. Nara will have his first solo exhibition with Zwirner at one of the gallery’s New York spaces.
The deal for Zwirner to represent Nara comes via Joe Baptista, via his Equivalence Art Agency. Until earlier this year, Baptista was a partner at Pace Gallery, Nara’s longtime representative.
In addition to Pace Gallery, Nara was long represented by Blum, which helped introduce his work to the US. Blum’s last show with Nara, at the gallery’s Tokyo space, closed this past January, a few months before dealer Tim Blum closed his gallery entirely.
Pace, which mounted its first solo for Nara in 2013, had not previously announced Baptista’s departure from the gallery. Zwirner’s press release, however, notes that “Pace Gallery will continue to have a relationship with the artist.”
In a statement about joining Zwirner, Nara said, “Now, 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. I am also aware that this good fortune rests upon the many layers of good fortune that have carried me this far.”
Nara is best-known for distinctive style of portraiture that often features moody young girls with banged hair. In addition to his well-known painting practice, he also works in drawing, sculpture, and architectural installations. Nara studied in both Japan, where he was born in 1959, and Germany, where he lived for over a decade beginning in the later 1980s.
He is currently the subject of a survey at the Orange County Museum of Art in California. His most recent traveling retrospective debuted at Guggenheim Bilbao in 2024 and closed at the Hayward Gallery in London this past Stepmber. He also had a retrospective that opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2021 and later traveled to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. His work has been featured in the 2025 Amsterdam Sculpture Biennale, 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the 2018 Bangkok Art Biennale, and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale.
His work also frequently sells for high prices at auction. Nara’s auction record is currently $25 million, set during a 2019 evening sale in Hong Kong. Last month, Nara’s Haze Days (1988) was offered during a Christie’s evening sale in London with an estimate of £6.5 million–£8.5 million ($8.7 million–$11.4 million); the work did not find a buyer.
In a statement, gallery founder David Zwirner said that he has been a Nara fan since first encountering the work in the early 1990s in Cologne, where Nara was living at the time. “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,” Zwirner said in a statement. “Instead, Nara invited us to contemplate a world of vulnerability and genuine human connection.”
In his statement, Zwirner described seeing the Hayward Gallery retrospective as a “true revelation,” adding, “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 honored to welcome Yoshitomo Nara, one of the most important and authentic voices in contemporary culture, to the gallery.”
