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Yoshitomo Nara’s New York Story Can Be Found in its Punk Clubs

Ahead of the major Zwirner show coming to Chelsea this fall, we look back at Nara's career and the impromptu drawings he gifted to one East Village bar.

It’s a warm summer afternoon in New York’s East Village, happy hour, in fact, inside Niagara, a divey joint with a punk rock pedigree that is announced by the mural of Clash frontman Joe Strummer on one of its exterior walls. Inside, a few patrons are taking advantage of the bar’s specials: $5 draft, $5 wine, $5 well shots. The scenery inside is typical of such establishments. The bar runs along one wall of the long, narrow main room; there are a half dozen beer taps offering up Guinness, Brooklyn Lager, Miller; an ample array of booze is stacked on glass shelves behind the bar; and a convivial server stands at the ready. This is very common stuff along Avenue A. But if a patron were to look over their shoulder, they’d be in for a wholly uncommon encounter with unfiltered contemporary art in the form of drawings by Yoshitomo Nara.

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One of the world’s most successful living artists, Nara’s paintings routinely sell for tens of millions of dollars. But in 2009 on the eve of a New York gallery show, he committed marker drawings on the walls of Niagara—an enduring gift from the artist to the neighborhood’s punk rock underground. A sort of thank you for the inspirational music and cultural disruptions that came out of the East Village when Nara was a teen coming of age in Hirosaki, Japan. Since that night at Niagara, Nara has had repeated New York successes: major gallery shows, 130 pieces in MoMA’s collection and multimillion-dollar sales at New York auction houses.

Now, 17 years after he made the Niagara drawings, Nara returns to New York a superstar, one of only a handful of living artists to have cracked the $25 million mark for a single painting. A year after he signed on with David Zwirner, the gallery is clearing out both of its spaces in Chelsea for a massive solo show opening in late October that will highlight Nara’s newest paintings and drawings, along with sculptures and earlier works selected for the show by the artist himself. The opening comes just days before the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opens “Yoshitomo Nara: Sentinels of Stillness,” an exhibition of three new monumental Nara sculptures.

Zwirner’s Chelsea real estate is some of the finest gallery space in New York: big, beautiful white cubes, but white cubes nonetheless. Sometimes sweeping gallery retrospectives, museum acquisitions and auction sales are not enough to take the full measure of an artist, especially one like Nara who........

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