Long at last, Yoshitomo Nara is back. With a new gallery and over 50 new artworks, Nara fever is reaching its peak in New York, as the Japanese superstar makes a highly anticipated return: a two-venue takeover at David Zwirner. As the hundreds-long line that swallowed Chelsea on opening night would tell you, Nara is an artist of a generation — and the exhibition proves he’s not done evolving.

Running until December 12, the self-titled event marks Nara’s first major show with Zwirner after joining, and parting with Pace, last year. Unfolding across the gallery’s 19th and 20th Street spaces, on view is a mesmeric collection of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, alongside a handful of ’80s and ’90s works personally selected by the artist himself. While not quite a retrospective (we’ll have to wait for that at SFMOMA in 2027), it offers a compelling look at the Nara we know and love: his stylistic evolution, influences from his early ideas, and a hint at what’s still to come.

The 20th Street presentation, which houses paintings and drawings, conjures a coterie of his “big-headed girls,” old and new. Some gaze curiously, others come armed, but none are simply sweet. Nara’s subjects, despite their youthful appearances, are never child’s play and challenge usual ideas around girlhood, innocence, and strength through politically conscious, anti-war themes and punk attitude at the heart of his practice.

Highlights include “Matryoshka” (2026); “Guns in hands” (2025); a series of drawings on the backs of envelopes, and “War Birth” (2026), a closely cropped portrait flanked by frank text: “F*cking War / War Birth.” Elsewhere, early works, like “Untitled” (1988), glimpses into a less cherubic Nara, contextualizing new pieces, like “Hairstyle 1” (2026), “Afterwords” (2026), and twin “Stillness Heights” (2026) paintings, not so much a formal shift but perhaps a return.

A standout moment for “Midnight Tears” (2023) fans is a gallery of three portraits, each towering over six feet. A venture into new technical territory, layering translucent acrylic atop colored pencil, paired with muted palettes and broader brushstrokes, lends the works a more luminous, spectral quality and atmospheric depth — the result of a recent glaucoma diagnosis, he revealed to the New York Times.

Around the block at Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery, Nara shifts into sculptural gears. 13 monumental snow “monster” heads fill the space. Inspired by the heavy snowfall of childhood winters near Mount Hakkōda, the sculptures serve as a more tactile counterpart to the paintings and drawings, giving the artist’s soft-but-strong ethos textural dimension. The bronze forms, coated in matte white paint, were originally sculpted by hand in 2024 and later blown up tenfold.

The Nara-mania doesn’t stop in New York. Three sculptures from the same series have landed at Washington, D.C.’s newly revamped Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, while one of his biggest paintings, “In the Milky Lake / Thinking One” (2011), is set to hit auction via Fair Warning on November 19, with an eye-watering estimate of $10 million to $15 million.

For those of us not sitting on eight figures, his third collaboration with Stella McCartney, themed “Rock ’n’ Roll Forest,” also hit the shelves. Adding to our list of must-haves is the art-printed adidas SPW64 sneaker and the hand-knit scarf of cascading Nara characters, each with a production time clocking in at 40 hours.

“When you look at his art, you see and feel him,” wrote designer McCartney. She dubbed Nara one of the most influential figures of 2025. “How he views the world through the eyes of a child who doesn’t understand why we have war and not peace; why we have killed nature instead of ­living in harmony with her. He is a pure jewel.”

Yoshitomo Nara is now on view at David Zwirner’s 19th and 20th Street galleries in New York until December 12.