Yoshitomo Nara at Hayward Gallery, London
June 10 – August 31, 2025
Images courtesy of Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery has launched what its curators—and now a growing chorus of critics—are calling the largest European retrospective of Yoshitomo Nara, one of Japan’s most quietly magnetic contemporary artists. Running from June 10 through August 31, the exhibition brings together more than 150 works—spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and ceramics—in an expanded version of a touring survey previously seen at Bilbao’s Guggenheim and Baden-Baden’s Museum Frieder Burda. Significantly, this version includes early sculptures and a clutch of recent paintings that deepen our understanding of Nara’s evolving—yet remarkably consistent—vision.
Nara’s figures—those unforgettable, broad-headed children with gazes that both confront and entice—populate the show like scattered yet insistently coherent psychological landscapes. Anchored in recurring motifs—the sprout, the red-roofed house, the forest, the blue boat—they speak to themes of resistance, rebellion, isolation, home and nature, all framed by the artist’s abiding infatuation with music, mythology, and popular culture. Nara himself dismisses the notion that his intentions have shifted over four decades, stating, “When I look at my work I don’t think what I’m trying to say has actually changed in that time … Whatever period I look at reflects a part of myself.” The exhibition’s non-chronological layout reinforces this idea, encouraging viewers to experience the thematic resonance rather than trace a linear development.
Curator Yung Ma, speaking at the press preview, emphasized that encountering Nara’s art in person is an essential antidote to the flattened digital reproductions so many audiences encounter: “We don’t actually get to see Nara’s work in person that often … you can actually then understand that … he’s a really good painter … you can actually see the texture of the works and the colours and the layering of the paint.” And indeed, throughout the hushed Hayward galleries, the tactile force of his layered brushwork, the small shocks of his sculptural surfaces, and the quiet theatricality of his mini-house installations all reaffirm that Nara remains, above all, a sensorial and soulful artist in full command of his means.