Offset lithograph on paper.

Printed with the artist's and publisher's copyright 'Dallas Contemporary ©Yoshitomo Nara', not signed.

'Banging The Drum' by Yoshitomo Nara is an offset print executed on ruled notebook paper — a support that recurs across his work and anchors his figures in the register of childhood. A single child, rendered in Nara's signature cartoon line style, stands over a red snare drum with both arms raised, clutching yellow drumsticks mid-strike. The expression is wide-eyed and tense, neither joyful nor aggressive — the ambiguity that defines Nara's child figures across his Neo-Pop practice. Active motion lines and loose ink dashes amplify the energy of the moment. Since emerging in the 1980s, Nara has built a body of work around solitary children whose apparent cuteness is consistently offset by an undercurrent of defiance or unease — a tension this drumming figure carries through posture and expression rather than the knives or saws that appear elsewhere in his paintings.