Galerie Humanité, Tokyo
Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
Private Collection, Asia (acquired circa 2012)

Yoshitomo Nara, Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works: Paintings, Sculptures, Editions, Photographs, Vol. 1, Tokyo 2011, p. 132, no. P-1995-081, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original, and the catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the texture of the brushstrokes in the figure's hair and face. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very minor wear to the upper and lower corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1995, Girl in Red is an exquisite example of Yoshitomo Nara's seminal subject-matter: the decontextualised, lone childlike-figure. Nara studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1988 to 1994, a time during which, because of his poor German skills, he often felt isolated and lonely. By the time he painted Girl in Red, he had just started working from a studio in Cologne. During this period, he started stripping his paintings from any unnecessary detail to focus instead on the central figure’s emotive potential. Nara’s minimal compositional style is evocative of the importance of the void in traditional Japanese ink painting: the more stripped-back the background, the more potent the central figure and its inner world. This being said, Nara’s practice owes more to the influence of children’s books illustrations (both by Eastern and Western authors), such as Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, than to traditional and postmodern Japanese currents. The single cartoonish head of a blonde little girl with ukiyo-e style slanted eyes emerges from the vivid red background like a symbol from a flag. She sparks protective instincts in the beholder yet her look is defiant and mischievous: “Nara's roly-poly children balance on the razor's edge: they are cute embodiments of infantilism in their chubby-cheeked plumpness. They are the incarnated cry for baby food and love - but at the same time true individuals who will not be defeated, quiet carriers of hope.’” (Stephan Trescher, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog”, in Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Munich 2001, p. 15)

During his relatively solitary years in Germany, Nara produced some of the most powerful works of his artistic career. Far from his h𝄹omeland, which was going through some deadly and traumatic events in 1995 (the Great Hanshin earthquake and the terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway), Nara’s depictions of insolentꩵ children in the mid to late 1990s in a way symbolise the state of mind of the Japanese youth at the time - pervaded with unease, vulnerability, and nostalgia for simpler, happier times.

By calling to mind universal childhood memories, Girl in Red is a wonderfully simple but powerful painting executed at the apex of Nara's practice. It “[evokes] the immediacy of children's feelings that his grown-up audience had long forgotten but that were nevertheless preserved in the recesses of their minds. These feelings in turn gave them the strength to accept their own solitude and to understand life as an inextricable mixture of loss and hope.” (Midori Matsui, “Art for Myself and Others: Yoshitomo Nara's Popular Imagination” in: Melissa Chiu and Miwako Tezuka, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool, New York 2010, p. 15).