Opening reception: Thursday, July 13, 6–8pm
From July 13 through August 19, Blum & Poe will host Tokyo gallery SCAI The Bathhouse with an exhibition of new paintings by Cologne based artist Yoshitomo Nara on the occasion of the 2nd LA International. This will be Nara's first exhibition in America.
Deeply influenced by Manga (Japanese comics), cartoons, Disney and his tutelage under A.R. Penck at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Nara's paintings subtly and disturbingly confront the hopeless and ridiculous aspects of human existence.
These formally composed figures express a detached, unique and complex psychology in which innocence, melancholy and cruelty are inextricably mixed. Children are one of the perpetual motifs and their expressions conceal and reveal paradoxical elements; purity and decay, cuteness and ugliness, the unspotted and the corrupted. Nara's peculiar paintings have a unique sense of balance which suggest a comforting kind of distortion and transpose the viewer through states as disparate as the isolation of a locked room deep at the bottom of the ocean, to the soaring and unlimited hopes and dreams of children asleep forever.