Yoshitomo Nara’s Largest Auction Painting to Fetch Up to $15 Million

By Grace Kim

Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning app will offer Yoshitomo Nara’s In the Milky Lake / Thinking One (2011) on November 19, with an estimate of $10 million to $15 million. At 8.5 by 6 feet, it is the largest Nara painting ever presented at auction, according to Fair Warning.

The work is also among Nara’s largest paintings. At the center, a child with closed eyes and a calm expression sits half-submerged in a pale pool of water. Compared with Nara’s familiar defiant figures, she appears inward and serene.

Fair Warning will exhibit the painting at 534 West 22nd Street in Chelsea from November 6 through 19. The space has been designed to resemble a Japanese temple, and the work has remained in private hands for 14 years.

Fair Warning dates the painting to 2011, the year the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan, including the region where Nara grew up. The disaster left him unable to paint for some time. When he returned to his studio, his familiar cast of angry, sometimes menacing children began to give way to quieter, more introspective figures.

Fair Warning identifies it as the only major painting Nara completed that year. Its restraint therefore sits at the point where his imagery changed after the disaster.

Fair Warning lists appearances in Nara’s 2012 survey (a broad exhibition of his work) in Japan and his 2021 retrospective (a career-spanning exhibition) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The painting also appeared in more recent shows at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda, and at the Hayward Gallery in London. Nara included it in his 2015 book Self-Selected Works: Paintings.

The Fair Warning sale runs alongside the November New York auctions from Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips. Many of the headline lots (high-value auction works) come from blue-chip artists (established names with sustained high-value markets), including Kandinsky, Monet, Warhol and Basquiat. Their careers were firmly established in the 20th century, a focus that contrasts with lots by living contemporary artists.

Loïc Gouzer, who founded Fair Warning after leaving Christie’s, thinks collectors may look at contemporary art differently. In an interview with ARTnews, he said: “There was a lot of not very interesting contemporary [art] that was pushed hard and then crashed, deservedly.” He was describing the speculative buying that swept through the market between 2021 and 2023.

Gouzer described the shift in another way: “The main dogma of the last year and a half, two years, was like, ‘Contemporary is over. It’s only about blue chip,’” he said.

Gouzer does not accept that diagnosis. He calls Nara “as blue chip as it gets for contemporary art,” pointing to the artist’s relatively small output. That limited production separates Nara from some younger artists whose markets have weakened, after collectors paid premiums for scarce-seeming works and found more available.

Gouzer said: “Now we’re in a period where people don’t want what their neighbors have.” “They don’t want something that is like some kind of commodity. Nara is still here and the market is strong, partly because his art is great and also because it’s really rare.”

Nara’s auction record stands at $24.9 million, set at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2019 for Knife Behind Back (2000). Fair Warning describes Nara’s market as having cooled somewhat since its peak, though major paintings can still fetch eight figures (at least $10 million).

The comparable In the Milky Lake (2012), which shares the present painting’s contemplative imagery, sold for $12.8 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2023. The result places Nara’s market below its record but still firmly within the auction market’s upper tier.

In November 2025, David Zwirner announced that it would represent Nara, after the artist had spent 14 years with Pace Gallery. Representation means the gallery that presents and sells an artist’s work. Pace said it would continue working with Nara.

On November 5, Zwirner will open its first solo exhibition with Nara, spread across two Chelsea locations. The show includes new paintings, drawings, sculptures and earlier works chosen by the artist.

Gouzer expects the gallery change to inject new interest into Nara’s market. He says: “An artist is a musical note, and then the gallery is an instrument.” “So if you change the instrument, you might perceive the note a bit differently,” he said.

Three large-scale Nara sculptures also recently went on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Gouzer noted the display when arguing that a gallery can change how an artist is perceived.

What does the gallery switch change for Nara’s market?

For collectors, the practical effect Gouzer expects is renewed attention, not an immediate reset of prices. Zwirner’s first Nara solo opens on November 5, two days before the Fair Warning sale. The pairing brings a new gallery presentation and Nara’s limited output into the same market moment.

Gouzer is confident that Nara’s auction record will eventually fall. He said he would not be surprised to see a major painting sell for $30 million or even $40 million someday, though he did not necessarily expect that this month. November will test whether Nara’s relative rarity and a new gallery can support the $10 million–$15 million estimate after the speculative boom of 2021–23.