Yoshitomo Nara

I like Nara's painting. There is something about them, they are mostly children looking at the viewer with an angry look. They draw you into the picture and keep you interested.

Yoshitomo Nara is a contemporary Japanese Pop artist, and is born on 1959 in Hirosaki, Japan. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, though his artwork has been exhibited worldwide. Nara received his B.F.A. (1985) and an M.F.A. (1987) from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music. Between 1988 and 1993, Nara studied in Germany. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. He is represented in New York City by Marianne Boesky Gallery and in Los Angels by Blum & Poe.

Nara is renowned for the creation of children characters that are simultaneously cute and menacing with big, evil eyes. Nara's work instills the audience with a sense of irony of the innocence of children and the evil nature of humanity. They portray children as emotionally more complex than most adults acknowledge: "charming and accessible yet enigmatic and charged with undercurrents of malaise and discontent".

"Emotions were not expected to be filtered, when make-believe was not equated with lunacy and when the world was a fantastic and terrifying kingdom to be explored, not conquered".

Nara has a huge following amongst teenagers as he seems to understand and capture the emotions experienced by young people, whose feelings and opinions are suppressed by society and feels the pressure and the obligation to do what is right as opposed to do what one feels.

Gallery of Yoshitomo Nara's work : http://www.assemblylanguage.com/reviews/Nara.html