A palm-sized clay head, scaled up tenfold, cast in bronze and coated in matte white — that's what Yoshitomo Nara is bringing to New York this fall. On October 29, David Zwirner will open the Japanese artist's first-ever gallery exhibition simultaneously across its two New York spaces at 533 West 19th Street and 537 West 20th Street — also his largest presentation in the city in nearly ten years.
The scope of works on view spans a wide range: new paintings from this year, recent sculptures, and earlier pieces personally selected by Nara dating back to the 1980s. But what really catches the eye is what he's done with his painting technique and the scale of his sculptures.
537 West 20th: First the outline, then a layer of haze
This space showcases Nara's recent shift in painting style. A series of portraits stare straight ahead at the viewer, rendered in restrained colors with delicate layering, tears welling in their eyes yet their expressions strangely calm — as if some sense of uncertainty has been captured and held still. Technically, he's adopted a new process: sketching first with colored pencil, then layering translucent acrylic paint on top, with brushstrokes bleeding and building up repeatedly, giving the works a rich sense of depth.
The show also features two extensions of his older techniques — recent monochrome works made with industrial oil paint sticks, and his "Lines" series, in which quick sketches from his notebooks are projected onto canvas and redrawn, aiming to preserve the original spontaneity and continuous flow of the line.
533 West 19th: Blowing up childhood snow monsters tenfold
The other space presents 13 giant bronze heads created in 2024, each one starting as a clay prototype no larger than the palm of a hand before being enlarged tenfold for casting. Coated in soft matte white polyurethane, the textures evoke the "snow monsters" Nara used to build during the heavy snowfalls of his childhood.
What's fascinating is that the simple facial expressions from the original prototypes read completely differently once blown up to monumental scale — the same face that once felt intimate and approachable in miniature now carries a weight of silence when magnified. Light glides across the smooth surfaces, lending the entire space an almost meditative stillness.
The exhibition is presented by David Zwirner. Specific ticketing and opening details are yet to be announced by the gallery.
