Not for profit space The Dairy Art Centre is run by collectors Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm. Until 14 December they are showing a major exhibition by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Entitled Greetings from a place in my heart it includes a retrospective of his drawings since the Eighties, many large scale paintings and several over-sized bronze heads.
Installation view
The Dairy Art Centre is a no labels gallery. At the entrance there are printed A4 sheets with lists of titles that you can pick up, but the rooms aren’t numbered so title-confusion is rife. The work in room 1 is actually seen by peering through a hole in the wall. Miss that and your ideas of the titles are out of whack and a room behind.
Nara’s work focuses on the depiction of wide-eyed children, usually girls. Shown chronologically, the room of drawings – some on old envelopes and tube tickets – shows the appearance of this style. A time-line has been scrawled along the base of the walls. Pre-2003 the face appears gradually, amongst other types of drawings. By 2011 the face has become the motif, a style has been born.
The technique uses large areas of flat, muted colours. We are given no context, the characters are merely surrounded by pale expanses. Old fashioned hair styles and simplified limbs give victory signs and strum guitars. A lack of detail forces attention to the atmosphere. Usually it isn’t wide-eyed innocence. These are the knowing portrait of modern kids who know the number of childline and like to recite it whenever they get told off.
Eventually the large show is more of the same. The technique becomes more layered, the colours more diverse. Teeth appear. But the eyes-too-wide features stare out everywhere, often like a cheeky girl looking as though she’s getting reprimanded and finding it amusing. One or two have a naive charm – especially if you are acquainted with a naughty four year old – but the exhibition is on a scale that makes the individual images repetitious.
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