The eyes do the talking in Yoshitomo Nara’s portraits - large-headed, childlike figures, their direct gaze heightened by tussled fringes, pursed lips and expressions of profuse anger or disappointment, sometimes, even loneliness. They are a window into the world of the Japanese artist. Nara’s work over four decades, including drawings, sculptures, installations and ceramics, is on view at the Hayward Gallery in London from June 10 – August 31, 2025, an expanded version of the eponymously titled Yoshitomo Nara, previously shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden.

“I want them to feel what cannot be seen with their eyes, through what their eyes can see,” said the Tohoku-born artist in a statement released by the gallery. Speaking with STIR, the gallery’s assistant curator Katie Guggenheim said about the exhibition, “In a large survey exhibition such as the one we are putting on at Hayward Gallery, it is possible to observe the interconnections between techniques and media in Nara’s work and to make sense of the intuitive shift between them.”

Nara’s portraits are rooted in his experience of growing up in the Japanese city of Hirosaki and his student days in Germany. Childhood features strongly in his work; he believes it is a time when the self is being created. As a child, Nara listened to the Far East Network (FEN), a radio station for a US military base stationed in Japan during the Vietnam War. As he stared out of a window overlooking an orchard, English songs blaring from the radio filled his room with joy and alienation. Navigating a language he could not understand piqued him to engage with the songs melodically while piecing together his own story for what the songs could be about. These influences come through in This Machine Kills Fascists (2017), where a caricatured female figure stands with her legs apart, playing a guitar, and also in Alone in the Wind (2018), a triptych composite of the face of a little girl, which hints at Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

“In my work, I am constantly using my own experiences of the past as a filter to explore who I am now and to make sense of the world[...] There is a rebelliousness in me which remains from my teenage years and I still feel as anti-establishment now as I did then,” the 65-year-old artist observed in his statement. In a curatorial statement, Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff notes that Nara’s portraits “evince a psychological immediacy that bridges the gap between high art and popular culture”. Missing in Action (1999) was one of the first larger-than-life works Nara realised on canvas. A little girl with a bulbous head wears a scarlet dress, its hem billowing out like a bell, with an air of mischief lingering on her face. The painting coincides with Nara’s time in Germany, where he pursued a master’s degree in fine art at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. This period marked the creation of the artist’s big-eyed characters, a creative outlet he found to express his many discomforts as a student trying to comprehend German—a language he was unable to speak. His initial curiosity and subsequent resentment shaped the style Nara is now recognised for across the world.

In London, a selection of large-scale drawings made by Nara in 2024 will be exhibited for the first time in Europe. “Drawing is central to Nara’s practice. It is something that he began with and that he has returned to with renewed emphasis in recent years,” Guggenheim tells STIR. Composed with Sakura paint stick markers on large sheets of paper, the portraits carry “a loose, expressive energy”, the London-based curator notes. She adds that it was Neo-Expressionist AR Penck who encouraged young Nara to draw with his paintbrush while he was studying in Dusseldorf in the early 1990s, which resulted in the development of his distinctive outlined figures against flat backgrounds.

Nara’s installation My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008) is made up of a painted wooden structure, with a domestic interior – dotted with piles of drawings on the floor and a desk with figurines, mix CDs, paintings, drawings and vintage ephemera the artist collected over the years. “The childlike impulse to build a self-contained world of your own still resonates with me and, having worked in the art world for my entire adult life, I can understand what it might mean for an artist with the profile of someone like Nara to try to contain and hold onto that feeling,” Guggenheim said about the installation.

The exhibition also includes works that touch upon loss and pain, borne of the artist’s experiences during the three massive disasters that unfolded in Japan in March 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi power plant failure. In From the Bomb Shelter (2017), a child emerges from an underground bunker, while Midnight Tears (2023) portrays a little girl with tears pooling in her eyes. Guggenheim points to a key shift in the artist’s practice in the aftermath of these catastrophes. “Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011,” she said, “Nara felt unable to paint and turned instead to sculpting in clay. When he returned to painting, he developed a very different technique of layering paint in large scale works that have a contemplative atmosphere, which reflects the shift in his attitude towards artistic production.”

“The scale of Nara’s artistic production is an overwhelming challenge, but we have been lucky that he has been very hands-on and has been very closely involved in the planning of the exhibition, both in the selection of the works and in devising the layout at Hayward Gallery,” said Guggenheim.Yoshitomo Nara seeks to reveal connections between various works by the Japanese artist, offering viewers visual cues to comprehend the guiding values and the sheer breadth of his practice.

‘Yoshitomo Nara’, the retrospective is on view from June 10 – August 31, 2025, at Hayward Gallery.