Yoshitomo Nara

23 NOVEMBER 2024 – 27 APRIL 2025
 

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) is one of the most celebrated representatives of his generation. He received international recognition for his “Angry Girls”: stylized depictions of large-headed girls with captivating eyes and threatening, defiant and angry, or melancholy and insecure expressions that became his signature works—and are now considered icons of contemporary painting. In the exhibition “Yoshitomo Nara”, the artist’s first large retrospective in Germany, the Museum Frieder Burda presents paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations from the last four decades.

While the aesthetics of Nara’s characters are reminiscent of mangas, his figures, animals, and hybrid beings are first and foremost an expression of his own feelings and thoughts. Sources of inspiration include his deep-rooted memories of a lonely childhood with working parents, his love of music and literature, his knowledge of Japanese and European art history, and encounters with people and other cultures.

Yoshitomo Nara was born in a suburb of Hirosaki in the north of Japan in 1959. After studying painting at the University of the Arts in Aichi, he was drawn to the renowned Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in the late 1980s. He remained in Germany for twelve years and further developed his unique visual language there. In 2000 Nara returned to Japan, where he still lives and works.

Among the international lenders are the Jumex Collection in Mexico City, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. The exhibition also includes numerous outstanding works from private collections that are normally not accessible to the general public.

Exhibition co-organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, and the Hayward Gallery, London.

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Exhibition Film


Audioguide

The audio guide of the Transformers show delves into the experimental and animated nature of this radical exhibition. In four in-depth conversations, exhibition curator Udo Kittelmann investigates aspects and issues regarding artificial intelligence. These stimulating and inspiring conversations explore often surprising thoughts on “what if” scenarios in a radically changed future.
Louisa Clement (b. 1987 in Bonn, Germany) graduated from Düsseldorf art academy in 2015. Will machines become our doppelgangers? In this conversation, Udo Kittelmann and Louisa Clement speak about digital footprints, adaptive AI, digital networks, and isolation, sharing thoughts equally intriguing and disconcerting about three-dimensional likenesses.
Annemie Vanackere is a Belgian festival curator and theater director. Since 2012 she has been the director and CEO of the theater Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. In addition to discussing the impact that the technologization and digitization of our lives has on the performing arts, Kittelmann and Vanackere talk about multiple intelligences and empathy.
Dr. Clara Meister is an international curator. Her curatorial work focuses on topics of translation, language, and music. In this conversation, Udo Kittelmann and Clara Meister explore the relationship between technology and nature, questioning technological progress and advocating more space for plant and other nonhuman intelligences in handling technological progress.
“Why are humans not content with themselves?” Alice Lagaay is a philosopher who is actively involved in developing performance as an interdisciplinary field of research. In this conversation on Jordan Wolfson’s animatronic sculpture Female Figure, Kittelmann and Lagaay discuss issues such as technological self-manipulation, the alluring and overwhelming qualities of machines, and the misogynistic aspects of the work.



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