Nara's First David Zwirner Show Rewrites the Merch-Blur Record

Yoshitomo Nara opens his first exhibition at David Zwirner's two Chelsea galleries on Thursday, and it runs to roughly 80 drawings and paintings spanning four decades. That is the hard number. The softer story is what the show corrects: decades of phone cases, skateboards and MoMA gift-shop adhesive bandages have flattened a serious painter into a lifestyle brand.

The artist concedes the problem obliquely. Interviewed in New York and Washington on the eve of two major exhibitions, Nara disclosed for the first time the effect of glaucoma on his work. He flew in from his home outside Tokyo to install the Chelsea show and answered a question about what originals offer that reproductions cannot.

What did Nara say about originals?

"The originals are covered with imperfections," he replied. "They have lived a life and have wrinkles like Keith Richards." The guitarist is now 82, with a face that is, in the critic's phrase, admirably unlifted. The quote carries Nara's usual register: deadpan, precise, a little melancholy.

The comparison does real work. Nara's solitary figures, with their widely spaced eyes and teenage-diary emotions, read as glossy when reproduced on posters and lampshades. On the actual surfaces, they carry weight.

Why does paper matter so much?

Nara is an obsessive recorder of Japanese girlhood, but he is also an obsessive handler of material. He paints and draws on textured surfaces — old envelopes, brown paper bags, photocopies of pages from a novel. He stretches his own canvases.

His method is closer to repair than to pristine finish. He often overlays images on collaged surfaces made from leftover duck cloth (a heavy cotton canvas fabric), cutting it into strips and applying it, as the source notes, like so much medical bandaging. The bandage metaphor is apt twice over: it suggests empathy for the irregular, the distressed and the damaged, and it explains why the best work resists reproduction.

A phone case cannot show you the seams. The paper can.

What else is in the Chelsea exhibition?

The Zwirner show, organized on what the critic calls a nearly baronial scale, includes a recent series of 13 monumental white-painted heads. These bring the tradition of sculpture unnervingly close to the forms of soft ice cream — one concrete comparison, and the right one. Monumentality that melts on contact. Nara has always worked that contradiction.

The survey framing matters. Four decades of drawings and paintings let viewers track the diaristic girlhood figures from small-scale intimacy to the new sculptural scale, past the merch and back to the hand.

And in Washington?

Three additional sculptures, the "Sentinels of Stillness," went on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., last Saturday. They mark the reopening of the Hirshhorn's sculpture garden after a four-year redesign — a second stage for a double-coast American moment.

So the week gives Nara two venues, two cities and one revised reputation. Whether the white heads and the bandaged canvases can outrun the adhesive bandages at the MoMA gift shop is the question the next few months will answer.