Yoshitomo Nara, the Japanese artist whose big-headed, wide-eyed figures have traveled the world for four decades, opens his first solo exhibition with David Zwirner on Thursday, November 5, and it fills two of the gallery's buildings in West Chelsea. The gallery says it is also his first major solo exhibition in New York in nearly a decade.

The show runs from November 5 to December 12, 2026, across David Zwirner's 537 West 20th Street and 533 West 19th Street locations, a short walk apart between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. An opening reception on November 5 runs from 6 to 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The gallery encourages an RSVP but does not require one.

What is in the two buildings

The exhibition is split by medium. At 20th Street, the gallery is hanging paintings and drawings, a mix of work completed in 2026 and early pieces from the 1980s that Nara selected himself. At 19th Street, it is installing thirteen of his sculptural enlargements from 2024: bronze heads scaled up ten times from small clay originals and coated in matte white urethane paint.

According to the gallery, those white heads take their cue from the snow monsters Nara remembers from childhood winters in rural northern Japan, the shapes that form when heavy snow buries trees. He sculpted the palm-sized clay versions first and pictured them at monumental size while he worked.

The new paintings on canvas are front-facing portraits with direct gazes, and the gallery describes a shift in Nara's color over the past year toward more muted, layered tones and softer brushwork. Another group of paintings uses a newer method: he sketches the composition in colored pencil, then applies thin washes of translucent acrylic over that framework. The show also includes recent large monochrome drawings made with industrial oil-based paint sticks, along with what Nara calls his line paintings, in which he projects quick notebook sketches onto a larger surface and redraws them in paint.

Who Yoshitomo Nara is

Nara was born in 1959 and has worked across painting, drawing and sculpture since the mid-1980s. The gallery traces his imagery to a solitary childhood in northern Japan, to folklore and children's fables, and to the popular music he discovered on a radio he built himself. His figures, usually children or childlike characters with oversized heads and large eyes, took the form most people recognize in the 1990s. Nara regards them as self-portraits, and the gallery notes that many viewers now read them as stand-ins for their own feelings.

Pairing work from the 1980s with paintings finished this year lets visitors see roughly forty years of that figure side by side, from the early drawings to the newest portraits.

A second Nara show opens in Washington the same season

The Chelsea exhibition overlaps with a separate outdoor project at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. There, three monumental Nara sculptures, sixteen-times enlargements of his small clay heads, will open the museum's Annual West Lawn Series under the title Sentinels of Stillness, on view from October 31, 2026, through November 7, 2027.

Getting there

Both galleries sit in West Chelsea between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the High Line runs overhead along that stretch. The closest subway is the C and E at 23 Street and Eighth Avenue, about a ten-minute walk west. The A, C, E and L at 14 Street and Eighth Avenue are a slightly longer walk. The M23 crosstown bus stops along 23rd Street at Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.

Starting with the 19th Street building and its sculptures, then walking one block north to 20th Street for the paintings, is the simplest route through the show.

Plan your visit

What: Yoshitomo Nara, new paintings and drawings, recent sculptures and early works selected by the artist.

Where: David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street (paintings and drawings) and 533 West 19th Street (thirteen sculptural heads), Chelsea, Manhattan.

When: November 5 to December 12, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Opening reception: Thursday, November 5, 6 to 8 p.m., free and open to the public. RSVP through the gallery's exhibition page is encouraged.

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