Fair Warning to Auction Major Yoshitomo Nara Painting for Up to $15 M.

One of Yoshitomo Nara’s largest paintings is also one of his most subtle. Instead of glaring defiantly at the viewer, the child at the center of In the Milky Lake / Thinking One (2011) has her eyes closed and a somewhat serene expression on her face. Her body is half-submerged in a pale pool of water. On November 19, the monumental painting will be offered by Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning app with an estimate of $10 million to $15 million.

Measuring 8.5 feet by 6 feet, it’s the largest Nara painting ever to appear at auction. The work has been in private hands for 14 years and will be exhibited in Chelsea at 534 West 22nd Street, which has been designed to resemble a Japanese temple, from November 6–19.

Nara painted the work in 2011, the year the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan, including the region where he grew up. The disaster left him unable to paint for some time, and when he returned to his studio, something had changed. His familiar cast of angry, sometimes menacing children began to give way to quieter, more introspective figures.

In the Milky Lake / Thinking One was the only major painting he completed that year. It’s since appeared in numerous museum exhibitions, including his 2012 survey in Japan, his 2021 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and more recent shows at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum Frieder Burda, and Hayward Gallery in London. Nara also included it in his 2015 book Self-Selected Works: Paintings.

The sale will take place alongside the November New York auctions from the Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. Many of the big-ticket lots being offered are by historical, blue-chip artists whose careers were firmly established in the 20th century, from Kandinsky and Monet to Warhol and Basquiat, as opposed to living contemporary artists. Gouzer, who founded Fair Warning after leaving Christie’s, thinks collectors may be getting ready to look at contemporary art a little differently.

“There was a lot of not very interesting contemporary [art] that was pushed hard and then crashed, deservedly,” Gouzer told ARTnews, referring to the speculative buying that swept through the market between 2021 and 2023.

“The main dogma of the last year and a half, two years, was like, ‘Contemporary is over. It’s only about blue chip,’” he said.

Gouzer isn’t buying it. Nara, he argued, is “as blue chip as it gets for contemporary art,” and his relatively small output sets him apart from some of the younger artists whose markets have taken a beating in recent years. In many cases, collectors paid a premium for work they thought was scarce, only to discover that there was plenty more where it came from.

“Now we’re in a period where people don’t want what their neighbors have,” Gouzer said. “They don’t want something that is like some kind of commodity. Nara is still here and the market is strong, partly because his art is great and also because it’s really rare.”

Nara’s auction record stands at $24.9 million, set at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2019 for Knife Behind Back (2000). His market has cooled somewhat since its peak, although major paintings can still fetch eight figures. A similar work, In the Milky Lake (2012), which shares the present painting’s contemplative imagery, sold for $12.8 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2023.

There’s also been a big change in Nara’s gallery representation. In November 2025, David Zwirner announced that it would represent the artist, who had been with Pace Gallery for 14 years. Pace said it would continue working with him. On November 5, Zwirner will open Nara’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, spread across two Chelsea locations, with new paintings, drawings, sculptures, and earlier works chosen by the artist.

Gouzer thinks the gallery change could inject Nara’s market with new interest. “An artist is a musical note, and then the gallery is an instrument,” he said, noting that three monumental Nara sculptures also recently went on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. “So if you change the instrument, you might perceive the note a bit differently.”

Gouzer is confident that Nara’s auction record will eventually fall. He said he wouldn’t be surprised to see a major painting sell for $30 million or even $40 million someday, though he’s not necessarily expecting that to happen this month.