YOSHITOMO NARA AT PACE/MACGILL

There’s always something magical at Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC. Behold ヅ 奈良 美 智!

‘All things must pass, but nothing is lost / precious days around me, sometimes farther along, sometimes under my feet.’

Yoshitomo Nara – Pace/MacGill NYC’s work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic coolness, philosophical depth, ironic edge, and a fixation with traditional artistic values. Hailing from Hirosaki, Japan, Yoshitomo-san specializes in printmaking, painting, sculpture and ceramics with a tilt toward psychology, sociology and world affairs. His art is chock-full of fun fervor, arousing phenomenology and diverse graphic gusto. Mashing up East and West with realism, idealism, spiritualism and intriguing weirdness, he mines the space between macro and micro, real and imaginary, global and local.

Yoshitomo-san has set up an unexpected but scintillating showcase of personal photographs and tricked out snaps. Intimate, self-referential, stupefying and sublime, the multimedia artist lets us see through his peripatetic lens, providing pictorial meditations of far-flung vignettes that add up to way more than the sum of their parts.

This exhibit is a sort of autobiographical composite of his work – a cumulative mosaic/artistic odyssey imbued with inspirations, impressions, people, places, textures, tastes, cartoons, stills, rural life, youth culture, drawings and portraits in places like northern China, his native Japan, rustic Russia and everywhere else.

There are countless combos of cool photos, magical montage, neo-expressionism, gypsy spirits, roving nomads and kitschiness mixed with a Japanese twist and the ’s worldly wit. We love his technicolored transitions that take you from real to surreal and then back again; his wide-ranging panoramas that conjure Wes Anderson-like alt-folk aesthetics and, of course, his sinister-cute pastel-hued emo Pop art that is charged with existential angst and human yearning.