A large painting by Yoshitomo Nara, the only major canvas the Japanese artist completed in 2011, is heading for sale in New York this month. In the Milky Lake / Thinking One, a work measuring 102 by 71 inches, carries an estimate of $10 million to $15 million at Fair Warning, the auction house founded by Loic Gouzer, with the sale set for 19 November.

The painting marks a clear break from the defiant children that made Nara famous. Its lone girl stands with her head bowed and her eyes shut, her expression caught between resignation and disappointment, her lower body dissolving into a pale, milky expanse. Gouzer, who said he had pursued the work for a decade, called it the starting point of a more reflective phase in Nara's practice.

Context gives the picture its weight. Nara painted it in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which struck his home region in north-eastern Japan, followed by a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident. He later compared the scale of the devastation to war. The canvas has stayed in private hands since it was made, yet it has appeared in every major Nara retrospective of the past decade, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art survey in 2021. The estimate sits below Nara's auction record of $24.9 million, set by Knife Behind Back at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019, still the highest price for a work by a Japanese artist; a comparable painting from the same period sold there in 2023 for $12.8 million. Before the sale, the painting will be shown in a Chelsea pop-up arranged around a Japanese tea room from 6 November.