Yoshitomo Nara claims to be afraid of change. Yet his current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents us with an artistic output that, throughout forty years, has boldly and humbly spread across different scales, techniques, formats and tonalities. Admittedly, there is a common motif running through all his works: the Japanese artist, one of the most outstanding of his generation, always depicts children to address themes such as fantasy, memory, home and violence. Nevertheless, important subtleties emerge between his illustrations, installations and sculptures; from vibrant, solid colours to overlapping and accumulating brushstrokes, revealing the multiple paint layers in each colour block; from the agile strokes in some drawings to the soft, smoky textures in other pieces.

This is his latest retrospective at a European institution – Nara has displayed many of his works in recent years at Geneva’s Pace Gallery and Vienna’s Albertina Modern – and the transformations and differences that stand out most to visitors are exactly those of the girls’ expressions portrayed by Nara. Powerful, penetrating glances take on an increasingly pivotal role in his paintings and guide us through the museum’s six thematic centres, as designed by curator Lucía Aguirre, in close collaboration with the artist.

There are no absent-minded eyes amidst the experiences of innocence, fantasy, but also guilt and loss: in his figures’ stares, child’s play is shrouded in fear, anger, melancholy – a sort of unusual clear-sightedness, an awareness of the underlying emotional complexity that overwhelms us with its earliness and, at times, its perplexing openness. As cartoonish, youthful and cute as his characters may seem, we are struck by the urge to look away at works such as Too Young to Die (2001), Slight Fever (2001) or Dead Flower 2000 Remastered (2020), which respectively portray a child smoking, bandaging a wound on his own arm and wielding a knife with a mischievous grin and bloody teeth.

The looks that have been shut out for some reason are just as uncomfortable. When we have become familiar with the overflowing irises painted by Nara – bursting with dreams, glow and, perhaps, ghosts and shadows -, the absence of an eye-to-eye encounter ultimately renders us somewhat helpless, aching for more. On some occasions, there are bandages intercepting us, once again harbouring the mark of a simmering threat or abuse. In others, melancholy weighs down the eyelids, permeating the images with a sentimental, introspective tone, draped in nocturnal metaphors (Dead of Night, 2016; Miss Moonlight, 2020). Tears could almost flow down the canvases (Midnight Tears, 2023) – and they do, but in a sculptural manner, through a fountain of stacked weeping heads flowing into a cup in the centre of a room turned blue (Fountain of Life, 2001/2014/2022).

It is curious – and beautiful – how, in Yoshitomo Nara’s mind, the fountain gushing forth life is an overflow of emotions – those that, when we are children, quickly come and go, nameless, fraught with mystery and force. His work is also an attempt to harness those waters in which we dive and bathe, so openly and spontaneously, when we are still very young. We are certainly struck by the bittersweet flavour of nostalgia for the past (how will a child, whose infancy is nothing more than the present, whose spellbound eyes are still able to imagine, see and feel this exhibition?), a longing to return, at once, to the security and the risk of having a lifetime ahead of us.

Right as we enter the gallery’s first room, we notice a reconstruction of the space in which the artist used to draw, a small painted wooden house that Nara calls My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008). The wording “Place Like Home”, emblazoned on the outside, invites us to a warm memory of a cosy setting, where all the objects – CDs, paintings, drawings, collections, popular references – are genuine companions, reflections of the truest desire, the most naive excitement. He did not even have to put it into words, but, at a press conference, the artist admitted that he missed his youth, when his works were not yet being exhibited or recognised, and his happiness came from complete and uninterrupted creative freedom. In rebuilding his room, Nara is perhaps attempting a comeback – all the more urgent in a time of war, where there is no refuge or viable future, something the artist never fails to address in a series of more explicitly political and activist works. However, he paradoxically seems to know that “[y]ou can go home again, […] so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been”.[1].

Yoshitomo Nara’s exhibition, sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, is at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until November 3, and his pieces’ impact is indescribable.

Umbigo travelled to the Basque city at the invitation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. (1974). The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Harper & Row, p. 48/