In 2019, Sotheby’s sold a painting of a little girl with a conservative side parting, a Peter Pan collar and the most unflinching green eyes – which stare down the viewer. It went for $25m, which makes it Japan’s most expensive painting. And it is a knife crime waiting to happen. The girls gaze is as withering as those in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Her eyes follow you as inescapably as Lord Kitchener’s in the first world war recruitment poster. But Nara’s’s painting, Knife Behind Back (2000), is more upsetting than either of those. Most chilling is what we don’t see; it’s all about the power of titular suggestion.
This nameless girl is a variation on a theme that Nara has been developing in his paintings since art school in the 1990s. Inspired by both Japanese kawaii (cute) and Disney twee, his cherubic, cartoonish figures with oversized heads resemble psychotic Kewpie dolls. “People refer to them as portraits of girls or children,” says curator Mika Yoshitake. “But they’re really all, I think, self-portraits.” In an interview for the Hayward’s exhibition catalogue, Nara confirms this. “When I paint I always think the canvas is like a mirror.” Not just a mirror on society, but a mirror on the artist. These little girls with big heads and bug eyes are a sexagenarian male working out his demons.
