Robert Nava: Supercharger
- Gen de Art
- 35 minutes ago
- 5 min read
February 19 – April 1, 2026
1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku Tokyo
Pace will host Robert Nava’s first solo show in Japan at its Tokyo gallery from February 19 through April 1, 2026. The presentation will feature new paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2023 and 2026, showcasing fantastical scenes of beauty and chaos that invite viewers to reconnect with the limitless imagination of their childhoods.
Nava’s works are populated by real and imagined creatures, angels, witches, and other beings rendered in energetic color. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Rendered at a range of scales, the works that the artist will show in Tokyo are at once inviting and unsettling, defying traditional standards of figurative and abstract painting with enigmatic passages of paint and pencil that land tantalizingly in-between.
A group of works on paper—created with different combinations of oil, acrylic, graphite, colored pencil, and crayon—will figure in the presentation, offering a glimpse into Nava’s robust drawing practice. “I usually begin every morning drawing in my sketchbooks, listening to music,” he has said. The relationship between his paintings and drawings is fluid: “The drawing impacts the painting, but it isn’t necessarily directly related every time.” In works like Diamond Sword (charged) (2024), sketch and brush stroke converge to form a malleable world in which a rabbit morphs into dragon amid a background of tactile washes of black.
This ambiguity, which characterizes all of Nava’s work, becomes deeper and more intense in his paintings. Not only is there a productive tension in his technique, but his subject matter, too, embraces dualities. “I’m sometimes at the edge where humor and tragedy collide,” Nava has said. In his artistic universe, benevolence and malevolence are constantly at odds with one another. In paintings such as Love Seal (2025) and Night Sky Leap Bunny (2025), vibrant colors—blues, reds, and greens—are juxtaposed with gestural applications of black and grey paint, as well as marks of luminous white and electric yellow.
Suit of water (Grease Evolution) (2024), another work on paper in the exhibition, depicts a dog-dragon hybrid that appears to carry off a two-headed goose. This composition, which recalls Bernini’s sculptures of abductions from Greek mythology, speaks to the artist’s enduring interest in the clash of innocence and experience. In creating new dimensions of his madcap world, Nava draws on a broad range of art historical and pop cultural inspirations, including the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Karel Appel, and Vincent van Gogh; classical myths and ancient art; horror and science fiction; video games; and cartoons such as Pokémon.
Nava’s first solo exhibition in Asia, Tornado Rose, was presented at Pace Seoul in 2023. His work can be found in the collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and other international institutions.
Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) earned a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University in 2008 as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2011. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad including Robert Nava, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (2018); Robert Nava: Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); Robert Nava, Pace Palm Beach (2021); Robert Nava: Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London (2022); Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Robert Nava: STAND, The Watermill Center, New York (2022); Robert Nava, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (2024); and Robert Nava: After Hours, Pace Gallery, New York (2025), among others. Nava’s work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, among others.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique history that can be traced to its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery continues to nurture its longstanding relationships with its legacy artists and estates while also making an investment in the careers of contemporary artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina Perez Simão.
Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a collaborative force in the art world, partnering with other galleries and nonprofit organizations around the world in recent years. The gallery advances its mission to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences and collectors around the world through a robust global program anchored by its exhibitions of both 20th century and contemporary art and scholarly projects from its imprint Pace Publishing, which produces books introducing new voices to the art historical canon. This artist-first ethos also extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other interdisciplinary programming presented by Pace.
Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West 25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. The gallery’s history in the New York art world dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. A champion of Light and Space artists, Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in 2022. It maintains European footholds in London, Geneva, and Berlin, where it established an office in 2023 and a gallery space in 2025. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates a gallery in Seoul and opened its first gallery in Japan in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development in 2024.
