Viewing Room | Yoshitomo Nara. Broken Heart Bench, 2006

"You could say that they’re self-portraits".

— Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara’s 'Broken Heart Bench', 2006 is the artist’s most monumental large scale painting made for the A–Z Project, a celebrated collaboration with the Japanese design group 'graf' in the 2000s. In the 'Broken Heart Bench' the canonical depiction of Nara's iconic 'girl' character achieved new depths of emotional sensitivity.

Yoshitomo Nara. Broken Heart Bench, 2006 (details)© Gary Tatintsian Gallery and the artist

Nara's approach to portraying his characters goes beyond a simple representation. Instead, he infuses them with an air of mystery and introspection. This allows his art to resonate with audiences on a more profound level, as they can relate to the intricacies and nuances of the human experience. Fragile and deeply immersed in their inner emotions, Nara's figures serve as poignant expressions of adult empacy, resonating with the delicate vulnerability of the child that resides within each of us: "I think it provokes you to have a conversation with yourself".

Yoshitomo Nara is a key figure in the contemporary art scene, whose signature style — expressing children in a spectrum of emotional complexities from defiance and rebellion to calm and contemplation — celebrates the retrospective freedom of imagination and personality. His paintings are diligently layered with acrylic paint, making each textured brushstroke and gesture visible, revealing a broad range of artistic and cultural influences from modernist Japanese and Western paintings, literature, illustrated children’s books, and music (folk, rock, and punk).