- 1066
Kusama Yayoi
Estimate
7,500,000 - 12,000,000 HKD
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Description
- Kusama Yayoi
- Between Heaven and Earth (set of five)
- soft sculpture on wood
each signed and titled in Japanese and English and dated 1987 on the reverse, framed
Provenance
Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo
Moma Contemporary, Fukuoka
Komagane Kogen Art Museum, Komagane
Private Asian Collection
Moma Contemporary, Fukuoka
Komagane Kogen Art Museum, Komagane
Private Asian Collection
This work is accompanied with an artwork registration card issued by the artist's studio
Exhibited
Japan, Tokyo, Fuji Television Gallery, Yayoi Kusama: Soul Burning Flashes, 3-28 June, 1988, inside cover page and pl. 14
Japan, Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968/ In Full Bloom: Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan, 1999, p. 108, no. 98
Japan, Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968/ In Full Bloom: Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan, 1999, p. 108, no. 98
Catalogue Note
Soul Burning Flashes
Kusama Yayoi
I want to obliterate and efface the gloom of the end of the century and open a shining door to the 21st Century with my own hand, hoping for the hymn of ever-shining life to continue beyond the quietude of death. – Kusama Yayoi1
The five-paneled soft sculpture Between Heaven and Earth (set of five) (Lot 1066) is a singular monumental work epitomizing Kusama Yayoi’s stellar ascent into international prominence in the late 1980s onwards. Distinctive for its exuberant eclectic mix of brilliant primary color, the piece was a key highlight of the defining “Soul Burning Flashes” (1988) exhibition at Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo, the first gallery to take on Kusama during the artist’s two decades of semi-obscurity following her 1973 return to Japan from the US. Five years after “Soul Burning Flashes”, whose catalogue quotes the artist declaring her desire to “open a shining door to the 21st Century with my own hand”,2 Kusama’s international revival properly took flight at the 45th 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.
Kusama’s celebrated soft sculptures were first unveiled to the world in the 1960s. At the height of her explosive emergence in the New York art scene, Kusama exhibited together with rising luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Robert Morris and Robert Whitman, etc. at a Green Gallery group show in 1962, unveiling an armchair and couch completely covered with stuffed phallic pillows. One year later, her revolutionary “Accumulation: One Thousand Boats Show” at Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1963 saw Kusama exploiting the entire gallery space, blanketing the floor with hundreds of phallic-shaped sculptures twisting and tangling like heaving growths. 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.
In contrast to the monochrome rooms of the 1960s, the current lot exemplifies the amped-up high-color Pop aesthetic of Kusama’s international revival. The riveting optical patterns evoke an exotically-hued tapestry blooming in writhing dynamism, or, from an interstellar perspective, a pixelated technicolored topography viewed from outer space—literally the liminal realm ‘Between Heaven and Earth’. Transposed onto wall-mounted segments, the unruly, quirkily-colored protuberances gain a heightened sense of grandeur alongside its paradoxical whimsicality, 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’”.3
The current lot was exhibited on multiple occasions in museum and gallery shows over the past three decades. Ahead of Kusama’s major touring retrospective at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum commencing February 2017, Between Heaven and Earth attests to the grand realization of the artist’s astronomical ambitions three decades ago. Kusama’s epic artistic visions, recorded in her own writings in the 1988 catalogue, profess sentiments and ambitions still relevant today: “The 21st Century will be chaotic amid ever-advancing high technology and information industry […] I want to obliterate and efface the gloom of the end of the century and open a shining door […] With our inner glowing energy that captures the soul burning flashes, let us open a shining door to the new age”.4
1 Kusama Yayoi, “Beyond ‘Obsession’, in exh. cat. Soul Burning Flashes, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, 1988
2 Refer to 1
3 Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, 2012
4 Refer to 1
Kusama Yayoi
I want to obliterate and efface the gloom of the end of the century and open a shining door to the 21st Century with my own hand, hoping for the hymn of ever-shining life to continue beyond the quietude of death. – Kusama Yayoi1
The five-paneled soft sculpture Between Heaven and Earth (set of five) (Lot 1066) is a singular monumental work epitomizing Kusama Yayoi’s stellar ascent into international prominence in the late 1980s onwards. Distinctive for its exuberant eclectic mix of brilliant primary color, the piece was a key highlight of the defining “Soul Burning Flashes” (1988) exhibition at Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo, the first gallery to take on Kusama during the artist’s two decades of semi-obscurity following her 1973 return to Japan from the US. Five years after “Soul Burning Flashes”, whose catalogue quotes the artist declaring her desire to “open a shining door to the 21st Century with my own hand”,2 Kusama’s international revival properly took flight at the 45th 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.
Kusama’s celebrated soft sculptures were first unveiled to the world in the 1960s. At the height of her explosive emergence in the New York art scene, Kusama exhibited together with rising luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Robert Morris and Robert Whitman, etc. at a Green Gallery group show in 1962, unveiling an armchair and couch completely covered with stuffed phallic pillows. One year later, her revolutionary “Accumulation: One Thousand Boats Show” at Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1963 saw Kusama exploiting the entire gallery space, blanketing the floor with hundreds of phallic-shaped sculptures twisting and tangling like heaving growths. 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.
In contrast to the monochrome rooms of the 1960s, the current lot exemplifies the amped-up high-color Pop aesthetic of Kusama’s international revival. The riveting optical patterns evoke an exotically-hued tapestry blooming in writhing dynamism, or, from an interstellar perspective, a pixelated technicolored topography viewed from outer space—literally the liminal realm ‘Between Heaven and Earth’. Transposed onto wall-mounted segments, the unruly, quirkily-colored protuberances gain a heightened sense of grandeur alongside its paradoxical whimsicality, 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’”.3
The current lot was exhibited on multiple occasions in museum and gallery shows over the past three decades. Ahead of Kusama’s major touring retrospective at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum commencing February 2017, Between Heaven and Earth attests to the grand realization of the artist’s astronomical ambitions three decades ago. Kusama’s epic artistic visions, recorded in her own writings in the 1988 catalogue, profess sentiments and ambitions still relevant today: “The 21st Century will be chaotic amid ever-advancing high technology and information industry […] I want to obliterate and efface the gloom of the end of the century and open a shining door […] With our inner glowing energy that captures the soul burning flashes, let us open a shining door to the new age”.4
1 Kusama Yayoi, “Beyond ‘Obsession’, in exh. cat. Soul Burning Flashes, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, 1988
2 Refer to 1
3 Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, 2012
4 Refer to 1