Lot 120
  • 120

Yayoi Kusama

Estimate
100,000 - 150,000 GBP
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Description

  • Yayoi Kusama
  • Dots Obsession
  • signed, titled and dated 1998 on the reverse
  • acrylic on canvas
  • 91 by 117cm.; 35 7/8 by 46 1/8 in.

Provenance

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2001

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some light and unobtrusive wear to all four corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Catalogue Note

With an intensely captivating palette of deep reds beneath the intricate arrangements of the artist’s signature circular shapes, Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession is an instantly striking painting from her widely admired oeuvre. The painting at once captures the obsessively repetitive nature of her most distinctive motif, the dot, as well as the extreme variety with which the artist has explored this theme over the course of six decades.

Conceived amidst the abstract expressionist-dominated New York art scene of the 1950s, Kusama’s dot paintings have fascinated audiences throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and continue to do so today. Unlike many artists from her generation, Kusama’s relentless drive and prolific yet singular obsession with the dot have left her work virtually unaffected by the changing fashions of the art world. Within this seemingly restrictive paradigm, she continues to push the boundaries of the dot paintings with a poetic language that has expanded into sculpture, installation and fashion.

After her early white paintings, Kusama embarked on the conquest of a formal territory that broadened the scope of her work far beyond the chromatically restrained aesthetic with which she was initially identified. Rather than a formally reductive undertaking, Kusama’s paintings tackled the vast expanse of the universe; not as a mythical claim to the connectedness of it all, but because she experienced the world as such. Having been diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the artist perceived the world through a vivid series of potent hallucinations, which she has brilliantly captured in her iconic Dot Obsessions. “My 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 the absolute of space. This was not an allusion but reality” (Yayoi Kusama quoted in: Yayoi Kusama, New York 2000, p. 36).

As a powerful reminder of not only Kusama’s signature artistic achievement, but indeed of her unique experience of the world, Dots Obsession is an outstanding painting from the artist’s celebrated oeuvre. Executed in a vibrant and visually striking spectrum of reds, it brilliantly captures her original artistic theorem in an exuberant spectacle of colour, infused with the same energy that has continuously characterised her long and prolific career.