Yayoi Kusama

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in October 2000

Arlène Bonnant, CAP Collection, Switzerland, 2005, p. 157, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. The lateral edges of the canvas are taped. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges and corners. There are two pinpoint surface accretions. There are no signs of inpainting under Ultraviolet light inspection. Unframed.
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Kusama’s Cosmic Door from 1995 expresses an impressive array of endless nets and cellular patterns, which, like many of her artistic impulses, can be linked to events and traumas of her childhood. This pattern, a summary of Kusama’s artistic agenda, stems from past hallucinations and disturbing visual patterns that persistently appeared in her field of vision during her youth. 

The gradations of gray hues in this canvas undulate outward in imperfect, concentric circles that seemingly lead into a mysterious cosmos, as is also implied in the title of the work. The forms are made up of small, interwoven, cellular forms that seem to evoke a microscopic view of the origin of the universe and the very basic particles that form our existence. Distinct from Kusama’s motif of repeated dots or nets, the amorphous shapes in the present lot can be considered complementary to her Infinity Net and Venus series, consisting of carefully repeated dots linked together into larger patterns.

Since 1977, Kusama has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work is characterized by obsessive and repetitive visual patterns and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates mirrored installations and soft sculptures that immerse the viewer in her vision of endless dots, nets or infinitely mirrored space, a process of which she refers to as “obliteration.” She shared the first time she experienced the effect of self-obliteration during an interview with Damien Hirst: “when I was a child, one day I was walking the field, then all of a sudden, the sky became bright over the mountains, and I saw clearly the very image I was about to paint appear in the sky. I also saw violets which I was painting multiply to cover the doors, windows and even my body. It was then I learned the idea of self-obliteration. I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas. It was hallucination only the mentally ill can experience.” (Yayoi Kusama in Yayoi Kusama: Now, 1998)