A song of art and fire

A drawing of a fierce little girl with her hair ablaze caught the imagination of Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, reminding her at once of her daughter and of a small accident from her own childhood, as she reveals to Carla Passino

- Carla Passino

WHEN art curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst was a child, her hair caught fire. Candle flames licked her thick, ‘fuzzy’ locks, luckily soon saved by a splash of water that someone had had the presence of mind to pour over her head. ‘It’s actually not the only time my hair caught fire—but that was the first,’ she recalls. These blazing encounters are a reason she was mesmerised when, as the then president of the Pace Gallery in London, she chanced upon a drawing by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. It showed a little girl with curly hair that peaked into a blaze. Ms Dent-Brocklehurst, who has always loved drawings for the way in which their simplicity lights the imagination and lets individual creativity fill in the gaps, became ‘obsessed’ with a work she saw as a link to ‘little girl me’ and persuaded the gallery to sell it to her.

Whether on paper, canvas, ceramics or sculpture, young girls are a recurrent motif in Mr Nara’s work, which the Hayward Gallery will explore this summer in his first UK solo exhibition, a major retrospective spanning four decades. Born in Hirosaki, Japan, in 1959, he studied art at the Kunst-akademie in Düsseldorf, Germany, and lived in Cologne for a time, before returning to his native country in 2000. He claims music—particularly from 1960s and 1970s songwriters, but also blues, punk and new wave—as perhaps his greatest influence, but it was also his time in Germany, where, not knowing the language, he relied on art to express himself, that led him to conceive the characters for which he has since become famous.

Although it is tempting to see something of a traditional Japanese kokeshi doll in the essential lines with which he draws his faces, as well as elements of the big-eyed, large-headed