Yoshitomo Nara valuation
Draws one child, alone, faintly hostile, and has done for thirty-five years.
Yoshitomo Nara was born in Hirosaki in northern Japan in 1959, a latchkey child in a rural prefecture, and spent twelve years in Germany studying and working in Dusseldorf before returning to Japan in 2000.
What a work by Yoshitomo Nara is worth
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Bio
Yoshitomo Nara was born in Hirosaki in northern Japan in 1959, a latchkey child in a rural prefecture, and spent twelve years in Germany studying and working in Dusseldorf before returning to Japan in 2000. Almost everything is one figure: a small girl, sometimes a dog, alone against an empty ground, with an expression that is never quite readable — sulking, defiant, or holding a knife. The sources are as much punk and folk records as they are painting. The Fukushima earthquake in 2011 stopped him working for months and changed the tone of what came afterwards.
One of the largest markets in contemporary Asian art, set principally in Hong Kong, and one of the most counterfeited. Unique paintings on canvas lead by a great distance. Beneath them sit drawings, of which there are many, often on envelopes, cardboard or found paper; ceramics and sculpture; and a very large output of offset and silkscreen editions, plus licensed product, figures and books. The offset editions in particular are frequently sold as though they were prints of consequence. Certificates and provenance to a documented gallery source are essential.
Knife Behind Back and the Hayward retrospective
In Düsseldorf Nara studied under A. R. Penck, and Knife Behind Back, a girl in a red dress frowning at the viewer, was painted in 2000, the year he came home to Japan.
The Hayward Gallery in London gave him his first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Britain in the summer of 2025, a retrospective of more than 150 works expanded from earlier showings at the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Museum Frieder Burda. Alongside the paintings and drawings it showed ceramics, sculpture in wood and fibreglass, and his small house installations. Those other kinds of work are valued on their own terms, so a sculpture or ceramic should be described by its material, its date and its edition, where there is one.
Best auction results
- Knife Behind Back HK$195.7m
- Acrylic on canvas, 2000 · Hong Kong · 5 October 2019
- Publicly reported
- About $24.9m. The record for the artist, more than five times his previous one, set earlier the same year.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
