Installation view, Yoshitomo Nara, 2010. All images via Tomio Koyama Gallery.

Yoshitomo Nara has unveiled his first series of ceramic sculptures at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo.  Nara has been studying sculpture for the past year at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, where he created almost 20 pieces.  Nara’s new work maintains his characteristic stylization of children, a trademark painter A.R. Penk has described as “angelic.” Like Nara’s drawings, his sculptures seem both innocent and disconcerting: lines are thick and simple, colors are bold and basic, eyes are either closed or blank.  Nara’s subjects, however, often cry, bleed, possess fangs, and brandish knives.  Of this conflation of puerility and severity, Nara explains, “I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives…”

Installation view, Yoshitomo Nara, 2010

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