Y ayoi Kusama’s kaleidoscopic clusters reach their zenith in Dots Obsession, a large-scale example from the artist’s Dot series executed in 2004. A measured combination of white and gray polka dots undulates across the surface of the canvas creating a vertiginous illusion. Fastidious circles of varying sizes and tones cover every inch of canvas, pulsating with energy like organisms under a microscope. Rendered in grisaille, the present work ushers us through a looking glass into the hallucinatory visions that have plagued Kusama’s psyche since she was a little girl. Born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929 to a merchant family who disapproved of her artistic aspirations, beginning at the age of 10 Yayoi Kusama would experience fleeting hallucinations; flashes of light, landscapes of dots and engulfing patterns would consume her field of vision. The artist famously recounted a childhood memory of a tablecloth with red flowers that tessellated onto the ceiling, walls and even her own body. Recalling her complete resignation to the hallucination, she says ‘the room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and absolute space. This was not an illusion but a reality (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). To cope with her psychosomatic anxiety, Kusama obsessively painted her fearscapes resulting in a mesmerizing visual idiom of nets and dots stretching to infinity. She refers to this monotonous, yet cathartic, process as self-obliteration.

Growing up in Japan, Yayoi Kusama felt ostracized for her mental illness and was treated particularly harshly by her mother who discouraged her talents. With a dogged determination to succeed as an artist, Kusama left for America in her mid-twenties. She recounted, “My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world” (Y. Kusama, quoted in M. Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in F. Morris, ed., Yayoi Kusama, London, 2012, p. 177). By the time she arrived in New York City in 1958, she had already begun producing her dot and infinity net paintings en masse, covering sheets of paper in constellations of circles. She was soon accepted into the city’s burgeoning community of avant-garde artists including Lucio Fontana, Joseph Cornell, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, On Kawara, and Donald Judd. They commended her rejection of action painting made popular by the Abstract Expressionists favoring her minimalistic, controlled approach to mark-making. Judd, a then art critic, wrote “Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent” (Donald Judd, “Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month- Yayoi Kusama,” Artnews 58, No. 6). Despite constant labels throughout her prolific career, Kusama has largely remained an outsider refusing to be characterized by any one movement. Yet, she has uniquely developed a body of work that is profoundly art historical and has inspired Pop, Minimalist and Feminist artists alike. Still, Kusama has maintained “I am not concerned with Surrealism, Pop Art, Minimal Art or whatever. I am so absorbed in living my life.” (Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 14).

While far more compositionally complex than her early paintings, Dots Obsession, painted in 2004, hearkens back to Kusama’s earliest works from the 1950s. Over the course of 70 years, Kusama has steadfastly pursued themes of abstraction, ethereality and infiniteness with unerring continuity and unrelenting determination. She has refined her idiosyncratic and obsessive language, manipulating and multiplying her dots to the nth degree in large scale installation, painting, sculpture, fashion design and writing. “Kusama is the Infinity Net and the polka dot, two interchangeable motifs that she adopted as her alter ego, her logo, her franchise and her weapon of incursion into the world at large. The countless artworks that she has produced and that carry Kusama’s nets and dots into the world, when seen as a whole, are the mere results of a rigorously disciplined and single-minded performance that has lasted for almost fifty years.” Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama: A Reckoning, London 2000, p. 14

Artist

Yayoi Kusama