Early Works
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Yoshitomo Nara This Machine Kills Fascists For Sale
Yoshitomo Nara
This Machine Kills Fascists, 2022
About this work
Yoshitomo Nara's *This Machine Kills Fascists* (2022) exemplifies the Japanese artist's enduring ability to channel political resistance through deceptively innocent imagery. The title directly references Woody Guthrie's legendary guitar inscription, situating Nara's work within a lineage of artistic defiance that spans continents and generations. This deliberate invocation underscores the punk rock sensibility that has defined Nara's practice since his emergence from the Japanese Neo-Pop movement in the 1990s. The work features Nara's signature wide-eyed child figure, rendered with the artist's characteristic economy of line and subdued palette. Yet beneath the apparent simplicity lies a tension central to Nara's oeuvre—the collision of childhood vulnerability with knowing resistance. These solitary figures, influenced equally by Japanese anime, Western punk aesthetics, and the artist's formative years in Germany, have become among the most recognizable in contemporary art. Nara's market presence has strengthened considerably over the past decade, with works consistently achieving significant results at auction and commanding dedicated collector interest internationally. Pieces that engage explicitly with political commentary, such as *This Machine Kills Fascists*, hold particular resonance in the current cultural moment, reflecting the artist's continued relevance and his refusal to separate aesthetic practice from social conscience. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work by Yoshitomo Nara, please contact Guy Hepner.
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Edition & Provenance
- Year
- 2022
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About the Woodblock Prints Series
Overview
Yoshitomo Nara's woodblock prints bring his instantly recognisable cast of wide-eyed children into dialogue with one of Japan's oldest artistic traditions. Where the paintings and drawings channel punk energy and raw emotion, the woodblocks filter that same sensibility through the disciplined language of ukiyo-e — the "pictures of the floating world" that defined Japanese printmaking for centuries. The result is a body of work that feels at once ancient and defiantly contemporary. Guy Hepner offers woodblock prints from across Nara's career at our New York gallery.
Technique & Tradition
Traditional Japanese woodblock printing is a painstaking relief process: a design is transferred to a block, usually of cherry wood, and a carver chisels away everything that will not print, leaving the image raised in relief. Ink is applied to that raised surface and the sheet is pressed by hand, one colour and one block at a time. Nara embraces this labour-intensive craft, allowing the grain of the wood and the slight irregularities of hand-pressing to become part of the image rather than something to be hidden.
That embrace of tradition is also a form of subversion. In his celebrated In the Floating World project (1998–1999), Nara took famous historical ukiyo-e compositions — the courtesans and kabuki actors of masters such as Utamaro — and reworked them, inserting his own scowling, solitary figures into the genre's revered templates. It is an act of affectionate vandalism: honouring the tradition while running wild through it.
, and on to recent works such as Knife, Sprout In The Hand Mirror and This Machine Kills Fascists*. Across these pieces the recurring motifs are unmistakable — the confrontational stare, the small figure alone against an empty ground, the flashes of text and object that hint at music, protest and childhood defiance.
Issued in limited editions, these prints are among Nara's most collectible multiples, prized for the way they translate the emotional charge of his painting into the deliberate, tactile medium of the carved block.
Collecting Nara Woodblock Prints
Nara's woodblocks appeal to collectors drawn to the meeting point of contemporary art and traditional craft, and they sit naturally alongside his lithographs, editions and works on paper. Guy Hepner Gallery presents authenticated woodblock prints with full provenance documentation. Contact our New York team to discuss current availability and acquisition.
About Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Japan) stands as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Japanese art, whose deceptively simple portraits of wide-eyed children—at once innocent and subversively defiant—have become icons of the Neo-Pop movement. Trained in Düsseldorf and deeply influenced by punk rock and anime culture, Nara creates works that resonate across cultural boundaries, commanding an international collector base and record-breaking auction results. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are held in major museum collections worldwide, cementing his position as a defining voice in 21st-century art.