Largest Ever Yoshitomo Nara Artwork to Reach Auction Could Net $15m

Yoshitomo Nara’s In the Milky Lake / Thinking One (2011) is set to go under the hammer in New York City later this month, where it will become the largest work by the artist ever to appear at auction.

The painting, which measures 2.6m x 1.8m (102 x 71 inches), has remained in private hands for the past 14 years and is estimated to fetch $10 million–$15 million when offered at Fair Warning’s single-lot auction on 19 November. Painted in 2011, the work is widely recognised as a landmark in Nara’s career, coinciding with a turning point in the life and practice of the celebrated Japanese artist. 

In the Milky Lake / Thinking One was painted in the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which left Nara’s home region of north-eastern Japan ravaged, and brought his practice to a temporary halt. Upon returning to painting, the playfully puckish and rebellious figures that had come to define Nara’s emergence in the 1990s gave way to more melancholy, emotionally charged portraits.

“When something like an earthquake or a war causes total devastation, it can temporarily illuminate things that are usually kept in the dark,” the artist said in 2012, ahead of his retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao.

“There are so many things we can learn from that. I’ve never experienced war, but I think the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident played the same kind of role for me.”

With her gaze lowered and eyes closed, the childlike subject of In the Milky Lake / Thinking One exhibits an introspection and fragility largely absent from Nara’s early work, as if dissolving into the ivory-toned background that surrounds her. At the girl’s waist, her pale green T-shirt is submerged in milky water, a reference, perhaps, to the more than 18,500 people who died in the tsunami.

For Loïc Gouzer, Fair Warning’s chief executive, the painting exemplifies Nara’s ability to “reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable forces: the hard-edged aesthetic and explosive energy of Japanese art with a deeply contained, introspective intensity”.

Ahead of the auction, In the Milky Lake / Thinking One will go on display in a specially designed gallery space—inspired by a Japanese temple—on West 22nd Street between 6 and 19 November.

Meanwhile, Nara will open his debut exhibition at David Zwirner in New York City on Thursday 5 November, almost exactly a year after announcing his departure from Pace. In Washington DC, the artist’s signature subjects are currently on show in the form of monumental sculptures in Sentinels of Stillness on the new West Lawn at the Hirshorn Museum.

Renowned for his Neo-Pop style, Nara is considered one of Japan’s most important living artists. His current auction record is held by Knife Behind Back (2000), which sold for $25 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in 2019—almost quadrupling its pre-sale estimate of $6.4 million.

Fair Warning’s sale takes place against the backdrop of New York City’s marquee auctions. Christie’s has set a combined pre-sale estimate of more than $800 million, with highlights of its 20th Century Evening Sale including Gustav Klimt’s Litzlbergkeller (1915–1916) and Wassily Kandinsky’s Betonte Ecken (1923), both estimated at $60 million–$80 million.

As Sotheby’s, following the recent success of significant single-owner collections, including those belonging to Paul Allen, SI Newhouse and Leonard Lauder, the sale of the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection is set to continue the momentum with an estimated total value of $450 million.