Yoshitomo Nara painting heads to auction with a US$10 million to US$15 million estimate

A large Yoshitomo Nara painting that has been in private hands for 14 years goes up for sale in New York on November 19. The work, In the Milky Lake / Thinking One (2011), is being offered by Fair Warning, the auction platform run by Loïc Gouzer, who left Christie's to start it.

The painting carries an estimate of US$10 million to US$15 million. An estimate is the range an auction house expects a work to sell for, and the final bid can land above or below it. The canvas measures 8.5 feet by 6 feet, or roughly 2.6 by 1.8 metres. ARTnews reports that it is the largest Nara painting ever to come up at auction.

Nara, the Japanese artist known for his round-faced children, painted the work in the years after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 in Japan, according to Artnet News. ARTnews reports it is the only major painting Nara completed that year. He included it in his 2015 book Self-Selected Works: Paintings, and it appeared in his 2021 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Anyone wanting to see it before the sale can do so at 534 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, a gallery district on Manhattan's West Side, from November 6 to 19. Viewing is free for the public during those dates.

Nara's auction record is US$24.9 million, set at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019 for Knife Behind Back (2000). A different Nara work, the 2012 painting In the Milky Lake, sold for US$12.8 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2023. That figure is a separate sale and is not the estimate for the new offering.

Gouzer told ARTnews that Nara is "as blue chip as it gets for contemporary art." In market terms, "blue chip" means the most established artists, the names collectors reach for when they want the most secure buy. He also said that "now we're in a period where people don't want what their neighbors have," a remark about how collectors are choosing what to buy today.

For a general buyer, the sale is a rare chance to see the scale of a single Nara canvas at close range, even if few people will bid on it. For the crews who crate and move a work this size, the job starts weeks before the hammer falls. The sale results will show whether the estimate holds, and the figure that counts for the seller is the price the auctioneer closes on, before buyer's fees are added.