Yayoi Kusama

Private Collection, Netherlands (acquired in 1965)
Private Collection, Germany (acquired in 2000)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2002

Warszawa, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Yayoi Kusama, April - May 2004, p. 48, illustrated
Braunschweig, Kunstverein, Yayoi Kusama: Werke aus den Jahren 1952 bis 2003, January 2003 - January 2004, pp. 25-26, illustrated in color
Copenhagen, Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, My Head is on Fire but My Heart is Full of Love, May - June 2002
The Hague, Gallery Ornis, Yayoi Kusama, June 1982
The Hague, Gallery Orez, Yayoi Kusama, May 1965

 

This work appears to be in good condition overall. There is a repair to the figure's left hand where the thumb had been broken off, with resulting losses. There are several areas of paint loss on the face; front shoulders and on the shoes. There are several areas of loss on the figure's right hand palm. There is an area of impact on the back left shoulder, with related stable cracks and paint loss.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is viewed as one of the 20^th century's most fascinating avant-garde artists because of her experiments and innovations with performance, identity, and geometric and natural forms.  Kusama began sketching organic forms as a young child, no doubt absorbing the daily-life influence of her family's flower and tree business; these early studies of buds and twigs fully blossomed into self-contained organisms in her later work.  For Kusama's oeuvre might best be defined as a series of cellular constructs, fantastical microcosms that find root in the artist's vivid imagination and that grow into unique, obsessive worlds comprised of spheres, nets, and other repeated forms. Viewed in this way, Kusama's paintings and sculptures come to represent networks of life or biological specimens that mimic cellular constructs viewed under a microscope.  She thus extrapolates the inner workings of living forms into two- and three-dimensional works of art that seem to bristle with the dynamism of the skeins, cells and appendages of our own complex interiors.  All of the works offered here display Kusama's fascination with form and nature and are accordingly representative of the artist's engaging oeuvre.

The earliest work offered is Phallic Girl from 1965, a mannequin of a young woman painted silver and partially covered with Kusama's trademark phallic soft sculptures, a stylistic trope she first used in her "Accumulations" series in the early 1960's.  The figure is topped with a golden wig and a silver straw hat, itself sprouting several phallic, or one might rather say potato-like, appendages.  Here, Kusama toys with the notion of the human body as host to her parasitic accumulations; the girl is, despite her casual posture, the repository of the phallic forms that threaten to consume her.  The work no doubt hints at Kusama's own stated phobias relating to the male sex organ; she deals with it here through compulsive repetition of the form, using it as an out-of-control weed that overwhelms the young girl, a stand-in for the artist herself.  As in all of her work, Kusama uses surface excess and repetition as a bulwark against personal fears welling up inside.  Shoe from 1966 is another object overrun with repeated imagery, here a woman's kitten-heeled pump painted bright green and covered with red dots.  Kusama seemingly infects this marker of women's sexuality with a rash, though a beautiful one that engages rather than repels the viewer.

Three later works, Flower Blossom Season (1988), Germination and Infinity Dots (both 1990), also allude to the artist's fascination with organic forms in their compositional mimicry of cell-like organisms.  The earlier work comprises hundreds of red dots in various sizes, teeming together in a vivid, pulsating mass that defies the stasis of the image.  Infinity Dots displays a similar arrangement, yet here in blue and with the individual dots extending completely to the edges of the work.  Germination first seems a child from the same family, but here, Kusama's white dots on green ground have sprouted interpenetrating shoots, together forming a dynamic sea of co-mingled forms that rely upon one another for sustenance and support.  In all of these works, Kusama uses simple forms and references to nature to replicate the idea of life, and indeed to confirm her own.

In the small painting entitled Dejection (1993), Kusama takes her exploration of the inner self to a deeper level, painting skein-like networks that might be viewed as nerves extending across the entire picture plane.  The white on black composition of the work may allude to the artist's attempts to depict the inner working of her mind, while the title suggests the emotional state that inspired the painting.  However, Kusama negates this depression in other brightly-hued and joyous works, such as Flower from 1996.  Here, the artist illustrates a basket of flowers in her signature black polka dots; a bright yellow ground defines the polka-dot-besotted basket, while the same yellow, a dark fuchsia, and a light purple flesh out the flowers.  The nets of triangles and diamonds that define the background at top and bottom, respectively, are among other signature compositional tropes in Kusama's arsenal, and in this delightful representational work, Kusama integrates the variety of her devices into an interlocking whole.  Here as elsewhere, Kusama boils down the complexity of life to its simplest forms, representing big ideas with a graceful ease and aplomb.

-Eric Shiner