By Peter Koloff
I got to the press preview for Yoshitomo Nara at David Zwirner early enough that, for a few minutes, I had the rooms almost to myself. No conversations yet, nobody gathering in front of the work. Just me and one of the major shows of the season. It was a little overwhelming.
Nara’s images are so familiar that you can feel like you already know them before you see them. The oversized heads, the children, the faces that sit somewhere between innocence, boredom and defiance. In person they hit differently.
One of the first works I stopped at was Dead Flower (2020 Remastered). It had the confrontational humor I associate with him, a real “fuck you” attitude coming from a figure that looks like it should be harmless. It made me laugh, and it pulled me in.
From there I spent time with the drawings, many of them black and white. They felt quick and personal, almost like fragments of thought.
Then I got to Green Song, and the show changed for me.
It was near Foggy Tale, Matryoshka and Girl from the North Country, and those four became my favorite paintings in the exhibition. Standing with them, I stopped thinking of the figures as characters and started looking at their eyes.
The figures are stylized. The heads are too big and the features are simplified. You could call them cartoons. But the longer I looked, the less they felt like images and the more it seemed like someone was in there. That happens in the eyes. They look suspicious, mischievous, guarded, angry or completely lost in thought, sometimes several of those at once. I kept moving closer. I photographed the eyes specifically because I wanted a record of what was going on there.
It’s strange to find that much in a face that is so deliberately unreal. What I kept seeing was something guarded. The sweetness is there, but I don’t think it’s the point. There’s darkness around these figures, and attitude, and humor, and sometimes something close to a threat. The faces aren’t realistic, but the feelings are ones you recognize.
Later I went over to the 19th Street gallery to see the sculptures. They’re white, clean, almost pristine, and they share the childlike language of the paintings. I liked looking at them, but they stayed objects for me. The paintings had become people.
That’s what I kept thinking about afterward. With those four paintings, I had the sense that something was happening behind the eyes. Nara never tells you what. Maybe that’s why you keep looking.
By the time the galleries filled up, my experience of the show had already taken shape. I’d come in laughing at the attitude and ended up standing close to painted faces, trying to work out why they felt so alive.
Some artists impress you with scale or technique. Nara did something quieter.
He made me look into the eyes of a cartoon and search for a person.
All photographs by Peter Koloff.
Gallery
Yoshitomo Nara
David Zwirner
537 West 20th Street and 533 West 19th Street, New York
November 5–December 12, 2026
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