Grand Palais, Paris Art Basel. Time shift bunnies, 🐰❤️🔥🕰️ ⚡️🔥🌩️🥕🐰 #timetraveler every part of the cartoon still hold a big place on my heart.
#pacegallery
Step inside Robert Nava’s (@robertnava7 ) Brooklyn studio and you’re surrounded by works in progress — skeletal forms, bunnies, loose drawings, paint spread across every surface.
Each morning starts with sketchbooks and music. These aren’t casual doodles but a daily discipline. Through repetition, he builds his own visual vocabulary. Forms shift, repeat, and evolve from paper into painting.
Nava’s creatures live somewhere between the human, the animal, and the mythological. They may feel playful at first, but something darker always lingers. Bright colors collide with raw energy.
We visited just ahead of his first solo show in Japan, which is now on view at Pace Tokyo (@pacegallery ).
Supercharger
Feb 19–Apr 1, 2026
Pace Gallery
Tokyo 🇯🇵
Robert Nava (@robertnava7 ) brings to Tokyo a cast of beings that feel unstable and alive, part animal, part human, part invention. Drawn in grease pencil and oil stick, then covered with acrylic and brought back into view, they stretch and reappear across fields of electric yellow, deep blue, and raw white. Lines double back, paint smears and get scraped away, gestures interrupt themselves until the image holds through tension.
There’s humor. There’s menace. Echoes of monsters and hybrid spirits surface, nodding to Japan’s long visual lineage while staying grounded in Nava’s direct, hand-driven process.
On the occasion of his Tokyo debut, we sat down with Nava in his Brooklyn studio to talk hybrids, myth, and the space he leaves for viewers to finish the story.
Read the full conversation via link in bio.
📷 @kimmmmjae
Happy Birthday Jumanji 👽✨💫🎃🐈⬛ cannot believe the time since following me home as a little kitten, to 9 wonderful trips around the sun 😌 #birthdaycat #majestic #regal
Step inside the uncanny world of #JeanDubuffet's Hourloupe cycle with artist Robert Nava (@robertnava7 ).
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Nava, whose exhibition "After Hours" runs concurrently with our Dubuffet presentation at our 540 West 25th Street gallery, speaks about the "play and obsessiveness" in the paintings, sculptures, and architectural models of the Hourloupe cycle, the longest lasting series of Dubuffet's career.
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Nava's works do not adhere to any kind of linear narrative—they are fantastical scenes of beauty and chaos that invite viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.
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In May, Dubuffet and Nava's oeuvres will enter into another dialogue along with works by #JeanMichelBasquiat in "Reverse Alchemy," the inaugural exhibition at our new space in Berlin. Tap the link in bio to learn more.
Thank you! @pacegallery and everybody that came to see the show 😌❤️💫🌷🐈⬛ What an incredible night. Very honored showing with @manningkylie and #jeandubuffet 🔥🔥
Open through April 24
Robert Nava can deliberate on an idea for months—and paint it in seconds. But recently the artist has been working to rein in his prolific tendencies.
Surging demand for his work has pushed the artist’s auction prices as high as $715,000. It’s often at precisely this stage of success that artists need to protect their careers the most. Nava has learned about the dangers of overexposure and is trying to practice patience. “But I’ll be honest,” he tells @rachelncorbett , “I feel like a Ferrari that only is allowed to go 40 miles an hour,” he says. While Nava bides his time until he can exhibit his next body of work—in a solo show this March with @pacegallery —he has co-curated a show at the gallery’s Los Angeles outpost titled “The Monster,” featuring artists like Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, and Paul McCarthy, and opening this Saturday.
Link in bio to read the full profile.
Photography by @axeldupeux
