Nara in Europe

Nara traveled to Europe in 1987 to see Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, and witnessed a heightened sense of individuality while visiting a friend at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. Determined to study there, he was accepted the following year, and lived in Germany until 2000. Nara's paintings at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, like Make the Road, Follow the Road (1990), initially took on allegorical themes, with figures coexisting in different moments in time, condensing memories and displacing events from everyday life. By the mid-1990s, Nara shifted his focus to a single, ominous figure often depicted with a large head and tapered feet, floating in empty atmospheres (as seen in this gallery). Sharpening the outline of the body in subdued pastels, Nara began intensifying the figure by experimenting with sideways gazes and slightly off-center placement, bringing it into a bolder and fuller focus against monochromatic backgrounds. “These works were born not from confronting the other, but from confronting my own self,” the artist has said.