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拍品专文
‘Nara may be one of the most egalitarian visual artists since Keith Haring. He seems never to have met a culture or generation gap, a divide between art mediums or modes of consumption that he couldn’t bridge or simply ignore. His art is highly synthetic, representing fusions of high, low and kitsch; East and West; grown-up, adolescent and infantile; and so seamless as to render such distinctions almost moot’ —R. SMITH
‘I want people to feel the commotion beneath the surface of my pictures’ —Y. NARA
In No Way! (2003), one of Yoshitomo Nara’s iconic little girls gesticulates in anger, her raised fist hidden by an oversized sleeve. She is conveyed through basic but mightily charismatic cartoon features: big bulbous head, a red slash of a mouth, angrily angled eyes, schematic legs merging with sock-like feet. She stands within a concave disc of neutral colour, whose surface shows a visible patchwork of square canvas sections laid on fibreboard. This blank background displays the DIY aesthetic that informs so much of Nara’s work, as well as its sense of limitless possibility: this is an unresolved narrative space that we are left to complete, inviting a sense of the childhood fluidity between perception and imagination. The inner world of a child – naïve and precocious, innocent and rebellious, elusive yet expressively direct – is explored through the cognitive lens of the adult artist. Although Nara’s figures are cute (or more precisely kawaii), their immediate appeal gives way to a vision of surprising depth. The grumpy defiance of the young girl in No Way! echoes a refusal to conform to any artistic rigidity. With intense formal restraint and a pastel palette, Nara achieves a sophisticated synthesis of influences, weaving together his own history with wider Eastern and Western cultural narratives to create a beguiling avatar of imaginative freedom and punk rock spirit.
Nara grew up as a latchkey kid, born in 1959 to working-class parents in Japan’s rural northern Aomori Prefecture. The daydreaming solitude of his isolated youth was accompanied by the country’s aggressive postwar economic development, and a rapid influx of Western pop culture influences, from Disney animation to punk music. Nara’s art bears witness to this cocktail of unruliness and innocence, and at its heart lies a wish for a return to honesty with the self, a sense of fierce, unfiltered sincerity that is kept at bay by the restrictions of adulthood. ‘I think childhood was when I was not receptive to outside influence or knowledge, when I was not self-conscious of how others would react, and when I could live truthfully, despite my inexperience, without revolting against my feelings,’ Nara has said. ‘… I have come to yearn for my childhood when I would cry out loud, laugh, and leap as I wished. They were emotions that I had almost forgotten in my stages of becoming an adult. This realization allowed me to re-evaluate my most important values. Perhaps, by making works with children as the subject matter, I am projecting my wish not to forget to be – not a “selfish child” but – “like a child”’ (Y. Nara, quoted in A. Sokhan, ‘Yoshitomo Nara: On Hope and History,’ Berlin Art Link, 22 September 2015).
Nara is often grouped with the ‘Superflat’ Japanese art movement that was spearheaded by his contemporary Takashi Murakami in the 1990s. Superflat, however, claims a lineage from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printing through anime, manga and the smooth surfaces of commercial imagery. Nara’s insistently handmade works – each typically created over one night in the studio, the artist chain-smoking and listening to deafeningly loud music – display a rather different spirit. He is more influenced by the story-books he read as a boy, and by the sleeves of the records he avidly collects to this day, than by the speed and sheen of anime. His is a slower, more retro sensibility, born of a meditative or even obsessive focus on specific objects: ‘if you think back to the ’70s, information moved very differently. There was no Internet obviously and even the release date of albums in Japan could be delayed as much as six months. There was so much less information then. So imagine that kind of environment and having so little info and all you have is the music itself and you have the album cover, twelve inches square. I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara, ’Artslant, 18 September 2010).
Nara has also cited the inspiration of Giotto and other pre-Renaissance masters, whose influence can be seen in the flat graphic space, luminous palette and dry, fresco-like surface of works like No Way!. Indeed, as Ingrid Schaffner has written of Nara’s travels in Europe and studies in Düsseldorf from 1988 to 1993, ‘his personal art history offers a terrific twist on the Western tale of artists from Monet to Van Gogh who achieved modern forms of abstraction through the so-called “primitivism” of Japanese art. Coming from the East a century later, Nara discerns in Western tradition an equally exotic source for his Japanese Pop art’ (I. Schaffner, ‘Idle Reflections: on Yoshitomo Nara’s Japanese Pop Art,’ in Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio 2004, p. 61). Far from the slick escapism of Superflat, in his art Nara finds a cathartic space, distilling a complex personal story to deceptively simple and resonant form. His children might be charming, but they are simmering with all the awkwardness, alienation and passion of an interior life. As Nara puts it, ‘I want people to feel the commotion beneath the surface of my pictures’ (Y. Nara, quoted in M. Matsui, ‘An interview with Yoshitomo Nara,’ Index, February-March 2001, p. 63).
***
NEXT CHAPTER: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM A PRIVATE ITALIAN COLLECTION
Christie’s is proud to present Next Chapter, a selection from an extremely fine Italian collection of international contemporary art. Spanning across our Post-War and Contemporary March sales, from Online and First Open to the Evening and Day Auctions, the work displayed here demonstrates the open-mindedness and aesthetic astuteness of its collectors, as well as their passion for what they themselves call ‘the esprit of our times’. It is this interest in the contemporary that lies behind the collection’s name; a reference to the literary interests of its collectors, it also reflects the fact that, for them, one period of collecting is ending and another beginning – they are leaving behind this outstanding document of the last twenty years of art history in order to pursue the coming generations of artists and their art.
This is a remarkably wide-ranging selection of works, but while it is enlivened with a refreshing eclecticism it has clearly been curated judiciously and with careful consideration; there is a sophisticated sense of the artistic movements and aesthetic and intellectual affinities that draw its various artists together, allowing works to speak to one another across borders and between generations. Düsseldorf photography stalwarts Thomas Ruff, Thomas Strüth and Thomas Demand sit alongside the work of Cindy Sherman, whose Pictures Generation sensibility finds a direct inheritor in the iconoclast Piotr Uklański. The practice of appropriation leads us to important works by New Yorkers Kelley Walker, Seth Price and Wade Guyton, whose urban materiality chimes with the streetwise spray-painted colour field of Sterling Ruby’s SP572008. Like Ruby, Glenn Brown’s eerily replicated Frank Auerbach seems to both herald the death of painting and imbue it with new life – a grappling with the medium that fuels the irreverence of Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Josh Smith, and the vital new painterly figuration of George Condo and Dana Schutz.
Just as vital is a diverse grouping of sculpture that ranges from Urs Fischer and Rudolf Stingel to Damián Ortega and Sarah Lucas. Alongside Schutz, Sherman, Roni Horn, Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas, Yayoi Kusama and Nan Goldin, Lucas is one of a strong array of female artists in the collection. The trailblazing African-American artists Kara Walker and Julie Mehretu are also represented, while Kusama brings a Japanese perspective alongside her male compatriots Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, whose large-scale 2003 work No Way! is a highlight of the whole collection.
The diversity of the collection is testament to the superb taste of the collectors, and this is on the one hand a passion project and a very personal collection of works. But in the depth of its variety, it also serves as a powerful statement on the art of the last twenty years: it reflects a profoundly heterogeneous art landscape that is grappling with the explosion of possibilities inherited from the artistic revolutions of the twentieth century, while at the same time responding to the glut of images enabled by a world that is ever more globalised and technologically interconnected. Characterised by innovation and inventiveness, and imbued with a spirit of dynamic, responsive connoisseurship excited by the cutting-edge, Next Chapter is a collection befitting its time.
THOUGHTS FROM THE COLLECTORS
My wife and I have always loved reading. Since our adolescence we have been avid readers of both contemporary fiction and classics.
My encounter with contemporary art has been unexpected: a friend of mine working in a small gallery dealing prevalently Italian post-war artists the cue. Hanging out with him and consequently visiting the exhibitions of this gallery I started discovering a completely new artistic language that I suddenly learnt to love. I quickly became as passionate as I was of cinema and literature.
Pushed by curiosity, I found myself interested in what was newest, deep inside contemporary art. My wife and I felt that this interest, together with our passion for cinema and books, was deepening our understanding of the contemporary artistic sensibility as well as completing our comprehension of the esprit of our times.
This was the beginning of my adventure as a collector. Each and every work has its own narrative. Its importance may not be immediately blatant, but manifests itself over time, sometimes with a totally different meaning to the one I bought it for.
It has now been more than twenty years since I started collecting works by international contemporary artists. I love visiting galleries, meeting the artists, talking with curators. My adventure is like a long book, starting with the first work I have ever bought - a wooden sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol - that grows of a chapter every time we buy something new.
These new “chapters” have accompanied me through my daily life, have seen my children being born and growing up, and me and my wife getting old.
Some of the works we have collected make my wife and me very proud. The painting by Martin Kippenberger, for example; or the portrait of Harry, Elisabeth Peyton’s dog or Tony’s, her partner. We are so deeply proud to have owned the large round canvas by Rondinone, the crying model by Richard Phillips, drawings by Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans. Not having being able to collect any canvas by these two latter great painters has been a reason of deep disappointment.
Appreciation for an artist isn’t always immediate, only rarely have we fallen in love at first sight, even though this happened in the cases of Elisabeth Peyton, Wade Guyton and Ross Bleckner.
I normally read, get informed, look at the artist a lot before getting captivated by his or her works. I enjoy choosing among young artists, especially for their always fresh innovation and sometimes rather surprising language.
I believe my wife and I could never live without art, because art signifies the harmony that nourishes our present, it would be impossible to stop collecting. It is a passion that could never be extinguished.
‘I want people to feel the commotion beneath the surface of my pictures’ —Y. NARA
In No Way! (2003), one of Yoshitomo Nara’s iconic little girls gesticulates in anger, her raised fist hidden by an oversized sleeve. She is conveyed through basic but mightily charismatic cartoon features: big bulbous head, a red slash of a mouth, angrily angled eyes, schematic legs merging with sock-like feet. She stands within a concave disc of neutral colour, whose surface shows a visible patchwork of square canvas sections laid on fibreboard. This blank background displays the DIY aesthetic that informs so much of Nara’s work, as well as its sense of limitless possibility: this is an unresolved narrative space that we are left to complete, inviting a sense of the childhood fluidity between perception and imagination. The inner world of a child – naïve and precocious, innocent and rebellious, elusive yet expressively direct – is explored through the cognitive lens of the adult artist. Although Nara’s figures are cute (or more precisely kawaii), their immediate appeal gives way to a vision of surprising depth. The grumpy defiance of the young girl in No Way! echoes a refusal to conform to any artistic rigidity. With intense formal restraint and a pastel palette, Nara achieves a sophisticated synthesis of influences, weaving together his own history with wider Eastern and Western cultural narratives to create a beguiling avatar of imaginative freedom and punk rock spirit.
Nara grew up as a latchkey kid, born in 1959 to working-class parents in Japan’s rural northern Aomori Prefecture. The daydreaming solitude of his isolated youth was accompanied by the country’s aggressive postwar economic development, and a rapid influx of Western pop culture influences, from Disney animation to punk music. Nara’s art bears witness to this cocktail of unruliness and innocence, and at its heart lies a wish for a return to honesty with the self, a sense of fierce, unfiltered sincerity that is kept at bay by the restrictions of adulthood. ‘I think childhood was when I was not receptive to outside influence or knowledge, when I was not self-conscious of how others would react, and when I could live truthfully, despite my inexperience, without revolting against my feelings,’ Nara has said. ‘… I have come to yearn for my childhood when I would cry out loud, laugh, and leap as I wished. They were emotions that I had almost forgotten in my stages of becoming an adult. This realization allowed me to re-evaluate my most important values. Perhaps, by making works with children as the subject matter, I am projecting my wish not to forget to be – not a “selfish child” but – “like a child”’ (Y. Nara, quoted in A. Sokhan, ‘Yoshitomo Nara: On Hope and History,’ Berlin Art Link, 22 September 2015).
Nara is often grouped with the ‘Superflat’ Japanese art movement that was spearheaded by his contemporary Takashi Murakami in the 1990s. Superflat, however, claims a lineage from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printing through anime, manga and the smooth surfaces of commercial imagery. Nara’s insistently handmade works – each typically created over one night in the studio, the artist chain-smoking and listening to deafeningly loud music – display a rather different spirit. He is more influenced by the story-books he read as a boy, and by the sleeves of the records he avidly collects to this day, than by the speed and sheen of anime. His is a slower, more retro sensibility, born of a meditative or even obsessive focus on specific objects: ‘if you think back to the ’70s, information moved very differently. There was no Internet obviously and even the release date of albums in Japan could be delayed as much as six months. There was so much less information then. So imagine that kind of environment and having so little info and all you have is the music itself and you have the album cover, twelve inches square. I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara, ’Artslant, 18 September 2010).
Nara has also cited the inspiration of Giotto and other pre-Renaissance masters, whose influence can be seen in the flat graphic space, luminous palette and dry, fresco-like surface of works like No Way!. Indeed, as Ingrid Schaffner has written of Nara’s travels in Europe and studies in Düsseldorf from 1988 to 1993, ‘his personal art history offers a terrific twist on the Western tale of artists from Monet to Van Gogh who achieved modern forms of abstraction through the so-called “primitivism” of Japanese art. Coming from the East a century later, Nara discerns in Western tradition an equally exotic source for his Japanese Pop art’ (I. Schaffner, ‘Idle Reflections: on Yoshitomo Nara’s Japanese Pop Art,’ in Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio 2004, p. 61). Far from the slick escapism of Superflat, in his art Nara finds a cathartic space, distilling a complex personal story to deceptively simple and resonant form. His children might be charming, but they are simmering with all the awkwardness, alienation and passion of an interior life. As Nara puts it, ‘I want people to feel the commotion beneath the surface of my pictures’ (Y. Nara, quoted in M. Matsui, ‘An interview with Yoshitomo Nara,’ Index, February-March 2001, p. 63).
***
NEXT CHAPTER: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM A PRIVATE ITALIAN COLLECTION
Christie’s is proud to present Next Chapter, a selection from an extremely fine Italian collection of international contemporary art. Spanning across our Post-War and Contemporary March sales, from Online and First Open to the Evening and Day Auctions, the work displayed here demonstrates the open-mindedness and aesthetic astuteness of its collectors, as well as their passion for what they themselves call ‘the esprit of our times’. It is this interest in the contemporary that lies behind the collection’s name; a reference to the literary interests of its collectors, it also reflects the fact that, for them, one period of collecting is ending and another beginning – they are leaving behind this outstanding document of the last twenty years of art history in order to pursue the coming generations of artists and their art.
This is a remarkably wide-ranging selection of works, but while it is enlivened with a refreshing eclecticism it has clearly been curated judiciously and with careful consideration; there is a sophisticated sense of the artistic movements and aesthetic and intellectual affinities that draw its various artists together, allowing works to speak to one another across borders and between generations. Düsseldorf photography stalwarts Thomas Ruff, Thomas Strüth and Thomas Demand sit alongside the work of Cindy Sherman, whose Pictures Generation sensibility finds a direct inheritor in the iconoclast Piotr Uklański. The practice of appropriation leads us to important works by New Yorkers Kelley Walker, Seth Price and Wade Guyton, whose urban materiality chimes with the streetwise spray-painted colour field of Sterling Ruby’s SP572008. Like Ruby, Glenn Brown’s eerily replicated Frank Auerbach seems to both herald the death of painting and imbue it with new life – a grappling with the medium that fuels the irreverence of Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Josh Smith, and the vital new painterly figuration of George Condo and Dana Schutz.
Just as vital is a diverse grouping of sculpture that ranges from Urs Fischer and Rudolf Stingel to Damián Ortega and Sarah Lucas. Alongside Schutz, Sherman, Roni Horn, Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas, Yayoi Kusama and Nan Goldin, Lucas is one of a strong array of female artists in the collection. The trailblazing African-American artists Kara Walker and Julie Mehretu are also represented, while Kusama brings a Japanese perspective alongside her male compatriots Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, whose large-scale 2003 work No Way! is a highlight of the whole collection.
The diversity of the collection is testament to the superb taste of the collectors, and this is on the one hand a passion project and a very personal collection of works. But in the depth of its variety, it also serves as a powerful statement on the art of the last twenty years: it reflects a profoundly heterogeneous art landscape that is grappling with the explosion of possibilities inherited from the artistic revolutions of the twentieth century, while at the same time responding to the glut of images enabled by a world that is ever more globalised and technologically interconnected. Characterised by innovation and inventiveness, and imbued with a spirit of dynamic, responsive connoisseurship excited by the cutting-edge, Next Chapter is a collection befitting its time.
THOUGHTS FROM THE COLLECTORS
My wife and I have always loved reading. Since our adolescence we have been avid readers of both contemporary fiction and classics.
My encounter with contemporary art has been unexpected: a friend of mine working in a small gallery dealing prevalently Italian post-war artists the cue. Hanging out with him and consequently visiting the exhibitions of this gallery I started discovering a completely new artistic language that I suddenly learnt to love. I quickly became as passionate as I was of cinema and literature.
Pushed by curiosity, I found myself interested in what was newest, deep inside contemporary art. My wife and I felt that this interest, together with our passion for cinema and books, was deepening our understanding of the contemporary artistic sensibility as well as completing our comprehension of the esprit of our times.
This was the beginning of my adventure as a collector. Each and every work has its own narrative. Its importance may not be immediately blatant, but manifests itself over time, sometimes with a totally different meaning to the one I bought it for.
It has now been more than twenty years since I started collecting works by international contemporary artists. I love visiting galleries, meeting the artists, talking with curators. My adventure is like a long book, starting with the first work I have ever bought - a wooden sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol - that grows of a chapter every time we buy something new.
These new “chapters” have accompanied me through my daily life, have seen my children being born and growing up, and me and my wife getting old.
Some of the works we have collected make my wife and me very proud. The painting by Martin Kippenberger, for example; or the portrait of Harry, Elisabeth Peyton’s dog or Tony’s, her partner. We are so deeply proud to have owned the large round canvas by Rondinone, the crying model by Richard Phillips, drawings by Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans. Not having being able to collect any canvas by these two latter great painters has been a reason of deep disappointment.
Appreciation for an artist isn’t always immediate, only rarely have we fallen in love at first sight, even though this happened in the cases of Elisabeth Peyton, Wade Guyton and Ross Bleckner.
I normally read, get informed, look at the artist a lot before getting captivated by his or her works. I enjoy choosing among young artists, especially for their always fresh innovation and sometimes rather surprising language.
I believe my wife and I could never live without art, because art signifies the harmony that nourishes our present, it would be impossible to stop collecting. It is a passion that could never be extinguished.