One of Yoshitomo Nara's largest paintings — and, according to the auction house handling the sale, the largest of his works ever to come to market — will go up for sale this month with an estimate of $10 million to $15 million.
"In the Milky Lake / Thinking One," an 8.5-by-6-foot canvas completed in 2011, will be offered on November 19 through Fair Warning, the app-based auction platform founded by Loïc Gouzer after he left Christie's. The painting has been in private hands for 14 years and goes on public view starting November 6 at a Chelsea space designed to resemble a Japanese temple.
A Quieter Child, Born of Disaster
The painting departs from the glaring, often confrontational children that made Nara's reputation. Its central figure has her eyes closed, her expression serene, her body half-submerged in a pale pool of water. Nara made it in 2011, the year the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated the region of northeastern Japan where he grew up — a disaster that, by his own account, left him unable to paint for months. When he returned to the studio, his usual cast of defiant kids gave way to something quieter. "In the Milky Lake" was the only major painting he completed that year, and it has since traveled through his 2012 Japanese survey, his 2021 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and shows at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Museum Frieder Burda and London's Hayward Gallery.
The sale lands alongside the marquee November auctions at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, where the biggest-ticket lots this season skew toward long-established 20th-century names — Kandinsky, Monet, Warhol, Basquiat — rather than living contemporary artists. Gouzer thinks that split may be about to narrow.
There was a lot of not very interesting contemporary art that was pushed hard and then crashed, deservedly.
Loïc Gouzer, founder, Fair Warning
He was pointing to the speculative buying that swept the contemporary market between 2021 and 2023. Whether a single Nara painting can move that needle is a separate question from whether it sells well on its own terms. At 66, Nara remains one of the few living artists whose work routinely clears eight figures at auction, and a confirmed sale in the $10–15 million band would rank among the highest prices his paintings have fetched. The result, expected within the next two to three weeks, will say as much about where collectors think contemporary art is heading as it does about one 15-year-old painting of a girl standing in water.