Kusama Yayoi

each signed in English, titled in Japanese and dated 1999 on the reverse

Private Asian Collection (Acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2007

Japan, Fukuoka, Moma Contemporary, Yayoi Kusama: Beyond My Illusion, 6-27 March 1999, pp. 26-27
Japan, Kagoshima, Kirishima Open Air Museum, YAYOI KUSAMA Dots paradise in Shangri-La, 7 September - 27 October, 2002, P.59
Japan, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, KUSAMA Yayoi Beyond My Illusion ‒ Selected Works 1952-1999, 14 May - 30 June, 2013

This work is accompanied with an artwork registration card issued by the artist's studio

SLICES OF INFINITY
Kusama Yayoi

Kusama Yayoi's celebrated soft sculptures were first unveiled to the world in the 1960s, at the height of her whirlwind emergence in the New York art scene. At a Green Gallery group show in 1962, exhibiting together with rising luminaries Andy Warhol, Robert Morris and Robert Whitman, etc., Kusama produced an armchair and couch completely covered with stuffed phallic protuberances. One year later, her revolutionary "Accumulation: One Thousand Boats Show" at Gertrude Stein Gallery in December 1963 saw Kusama exploiting the entire gallery space. Mesmerising, menacing and mischievous all at once, the alluring power of Kusama's uncanny installation was raved about by the likes of Warhol and American critic Brian O'Doherty, who described Kusama's art as the production of both object and environment.

In Beyond My Illusion / Imaginary Flowers of Shangri-La (1999) (Lot 1058), Kusama's signature soft sculptures are reimagined as a stately golden triptych, with exquisite flowers nestling within teeming fields of her famous gourd-shaped tubers. Transposed from a horizontal sculpture into a mounted triptych, the unruly protuberances are immortalized and silenced, gaining a grandiose, almost regal, quality. In contrast to the immersive rooms populating the growing number of Kusama retrospectives around the world today, the current triptych is less a sensational shock to the senses than a meticulous slice of the sublime, allowing for a detached contemplation of Kusama's singular sense of the infinite. "I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process", Kusama once told an interviewer about her trademark stuffed sculptures, which are representative of her longstanding fear and distaste of the male sexual organ. "I call this process 'obliteration'".

Peering out from the current lot's sea of glittering protuberances are tiny florets of daisies, chaste and unassertive, counteracting the psychosexual allusions with transcendent touches of whimsy and grace. Kusama's ubiquitous flower motif references her well-documented hallucination as a child; in her autobiography the artist wrote: "One day, when I was a little girl...I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness [...] I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers."¹

A departure from Kusama's monstrous plants and flowers in other works, the humble daisies in the current lot evoke the energy of simple, hopeful, personal and artistic growth. Created in 1999, the current triptych emerges from the pivotal and uplifting 1990s era of the artist's legendary career. After an explosive rise to stardom in New York, Kusama retreated into a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1975, withdrawing into two decades of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing an extraordinarily prolific body of work. Kusama's international revival began at the 1993 Venice Biennale: constructing a dazzling mirror room filled with pumpkin sculptures for the Japanese pavilion, Kusama reminded the world of the enduring brilliance of her aesthetic and ignited her swift and phenomenal rise to immortal stardom. The current lot was created one year after another major milestone – the defining "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968" exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998, which subsequently travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

¹ Kusama, Struggle and Wandering of My Soul, 1975, p. 2