Yayoi Kusama

signed in English and dated 2007
This work is unique

Ota Fina Arts, Tokyo

The work is in very good condition overall.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Yayoi Kusama is considered Japan's greatest living artist. Her various forms of expression all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation. Her work shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She is a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design, and in 2006, she became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's most prestigious prizes for internationally recognized artists. She has long struggled with mental illness.

 

Now 80 years old, Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929. As a child she was haunted by hallucinations of dots covering everything she saw. She loved to paint and many of her childhood drawings reflect her visions, showing traces of dots and other patterns, which would later develop into an obsession in her art.

 

"My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease." [1]

 

Attracted by the experimental promise of the post-war international art scene, Kusama moved to New York City in 1958. At this time, the American artist with whom she had corresponded and respected the most was Georgia O'Keeffe, then an elderly lady, relatively unconnected with the rapidly changing New York art scene. O'Keeffe possibly became an early role model because she was a successful female artist who had transmuted natural forms into her painting, but she had no influence on Kusama's work at this time where the significant change was one of scale.

 

In 1959 Kusama produced her first Infinity Net paintings – vast mural-sized canvases, entirely covered in rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops. Gradually the emerging young generation of New York artists – Minimalists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella – became major fans of her work, which foreshadowed the Minimalist aesthetics that they later championed.

 

In 1960 she was one of only two American-based artists (the other was Mark Rothko) to be included, alongside Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, in a seminal exhibition of Monochrome paintings at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen in Germany.

 

She developed other striking bodies of work including the phallic Accumulation soft-sculpture series, the Sex Obsession series, and Compulsion Furniture, which she later incorporated into full-scale sensorial environments. From 1967 she staged provocative happenings in locations including the New York Stock Exchange and the Museum of Modern Art. Painting the participants' bodies with polka dots or dressing them in her custom-made fashion designs, she created risqué situational performances, merging her inner artistic world with external realities.

 

Rivalling Andy Warhol for press attention, the paparazzi dubbed her "Polka Dot Princess" and "Dotty" after the spots in her work. As Kusama's art changed from painting and sculpture to happenings, the mental illness she has battled since childhood grew worse. Her happenings did not generate revenue and also increasingly alienated her from the press, who dismissed them as merely salacious.

 

Struggling economically and emotionally, Kusama left New York in the early 1970s and later checked herself into a Tokyo mental institution. Diagnosed with obsessional neurosis, Kusama has said she would have killed herself long ago if it were not for art. She started writing and has published more than a dozen semi-autobiographical books while also continuing to paint and create sculpture and installation art.

In 1993 she was chosen to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale. Her project – for which she filled a dazzling Mirror Room filled with life-size pumpkin sculptures over which she presided in magician's garb – was a huge success. Like her other "trademark" the infinity nets, the pumpkin has become a form of alter-ego for Kusama. Pumpkins evoke memories of the artist's childhood as her family grew them in their garden when she was young, and they ate copious amounts of them during the war. After Venice she produced a huge, vivid yellow pumpkin covered with an optical pattern of black spots as an outdoor sculpture, now at the Benesse Art Foundation, Naoshima – a tiny island in Japan's inland Setonaikai Sea.

Situated approximately 400 miles southwest of Tokyo, Naoshima is home to a major collection of Impressionist and Contemporary art, and it is famous for its site-specific exhibits, of which Kusama's Pumpkin (1994) is one. The 2-metre work was acquired by the museum for its permanent collection and has become a definitive feature of the project, positioned at the end of a pier projecting into the sea. Gradually over time it has been joined by other masterworks that successfully integrate with the rugged landscape.

 

The current work is a sculpture which captures the imagination of anyone who casts their eyes upon it. Like the Naoshima work, the bright yellow skin is covered with an intricate pattern of black polka dots which derive from Kusama's hallucinations. Only seventeen pumpkins from this series have ever been made by the artist, each work unique and in varying colours, sizes and patterns of dots; the classic combination of black on yellow being the most popular. This sale therefore provides a unique opportunity to acquire an extremely rare and important work of art.

 

Kusama's work is included in leading museum collections throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

 

Her work has been the subject of many important exhibitions, including Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan (1987); Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1989); "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958-1969", LACMA, (travelling to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), 1998-99; Le Consortium, Dijon (travelling to Maison de la Culture du Japon, Paris; Kunsthallen Brandts KL DeFabrik, Denmark; Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse; Kunsthalle Wien; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul), 2001-2002; "KUSAMATRIX", Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004-2005; and "The Mirrored Years", Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (2008) (travelling to MCA Sydney, and Wellington, New Zealand in 2009).

[1] http://www.bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2192