Lot 26 email save

YOSHITOMO NARA, Black Hole Cosmic Heads, 2004

Sign In to see what this sold for

Black Hole Cosmic Heads, 2004
Lacquer and fiberglass-reinforced plastic in two parts. Main disc: 82 5/8 x 82 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. (209.9 x 209.9 x 60 cm); single head: 19 x 12 x 12 in. (48.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm). Signed and dated "Nara 2004" on the reverse. This work is unique from a series of six similar works.

PROVENANCE Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna
One of the most prolific artists to emerge from the Japanese Pop movement of the 1990s, artist Yoshitomo Nara's oeuvre includes thematic traits derived from Japanese anime cartoons and manga comics, imbued with a palpable sense of punk rock nihilism and defiance wrapped around the uniquely Japanese phenomenon of kawaii (cute) and otaku cultures: "Hello Kitty channeling the Sex Pistols," (I. Schaffner, Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, Cleveland, 2003). Nara's body of work explores the simultaneously liberating and terrifying world of childhood imagination as he has fashioned a universe populated by little girls whose insolent stances and expressions of thinly veiled malice belie their inherent cuteness; big-eyed and pigtailed, foulmouthed chain-smoking representatives of the inherent rebelliousness of youth and adolescence. Black Hole Cosmic Heads, touches on some of Nara's darker themes. His iconic little girls reappear in the present lot, at least in part— their disembodied heads, cast in black plastic, float on the surface of a dark, reflective pool. Suggestive of a spinning tidal pool or, as the name suggests, a black hole, the work induces a sense of muted dread; it touches the nerve of our collective infantile memories of the universe as overwhelmingly infinite and dangerously prodigious.

View Phillips de Pury & Company next auction.

Similar lots up for auction