Yoshitomo Nara has returned to New York with a two-venue exhibition at David Zwirner, his first gallery show in the city in nine years. Nearly 100 works fill the dealer's spaces on West 20th and West 19th Streets, ranging across the Japanese artist's career and including new material fresh from his studio in Nasushiobara. The show runs from November 5 to December 12.

The artist's wide-eyed, huge-headed girls are everywhere, brandishing knives and holding guns, staring out at the viewer with a charm that barely softens their menace. One painting from 2020 shows a little girl holding a blade as blood drips from her grinning mouth, a cut flower at her feet and a jacket carrying a blunt two-word insult. The curator Mika Yoshitake has suggested that these characters may all be self-portraits, a reading that casts Nara's sweetness as a cover for anger and mischief.

Alongside the familiar figures, the show reveals how much Nara's painting has changed. Four large new canvases present girls as serene, almost ghostly presences in patchy fields of colour, while a small 2026 portrait, Young Yayoi, depicts a young Yayoi Kusama with her signature bob in a quiet, chapel-like register. Enormous bronze heads, scaled up from small clay models and coated in white urethane, fill one of the galleries like snow-covered sculptures.

Nara, who turns 67 next month, is now firmly established as a blue-chip figure, with his work selling for as much as 24.9 million dollars and a retrospective planned at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year. The Zwirner show is a crowd-pleaser, but it also makes the case that his appeal rests on something stranger than cuteness: an inscrutability that keeps viewers guessing about who these girls really are.