- Exhibition Dates: June 28 – November 3, 2024
- Curator: Lucía Agirre
- Sponsor: BBVA Foundation
- Organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, and the Hayward Gallery, London
Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, and his impressive images of children with large heads and big eyes—at times menacing, challenging, and defiant, but also melancholic and uncertain—are widely recognized.
Nara’s characters, his figures and animals, are a reflection of himself: Childhood memories, his life experiences, his knowledge of music, art, and society, in Japan and abroad, are the sources of his creativity.
The motifs which recur in his work—including the red-roofed house, the sprouts, the puddle, the box, the blue boat, and the forest—reveal the continuity of thought he has maintained throughout his career, and they serve to highlight his stylistic development.
The first major solo exhibition of Nara’s work to be held in an European museum is uniquely devised for the gallery space at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and will tour to Baden-Baden and London, where the display will be reconfigured in relation to each venue.