Yayoi Kusama

David Zwirner, New York
Private Collection, South America
Phillips, New York, Contemporary Art, 13 November 2014, Lot 35
Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Yayoi Kusama, 2009, n.p., illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the yellow is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals two light and unobtrusive rub marks towards the centre of the composition. A tiny speck of paint loss to the extreme upper left corner tip has been lightly inpainted. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in an extraordinary vibrant palette of yellow, red and blue, Fear of Death is an immediately captivating painting by one of the most admired and intriguing artists of the twentieth century. Characterised by a uniquely obsessive spirit, Yayoi Kusama has throughout her prolific 50-year long career assumed a unique position in contemporary art.

Employing a seemingly restrictive paradigm, Kusama has continually pushed the formal possibilities of painting through a poetic visual language that has become as iconic as her striking persona. Often expressed in the form of dots, nets or in the present work through the repeated symbol of an eye, Kusama’s idiosyncratic paintings recall the all-over compositions of the abstract expressionists amongst whom she emerged as an artist in the New York scene of the 1950s. Unlike any of her male contemporaries, however, she never showed an interest in the metaphysics of the sublime, but sought to express a much more vivid and direct experience. Having been diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kusama perceived the world through a vivid series of potent hallucinations that are brilliantly captured in her paintings. Explaining the intensity of such moments, Kusama remarked: “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 illusion but reality” (Yayoi Kusama quoted in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 35-36).

The present work, Fear of Death, perfectly captures Kusama’s obsessive spirit in the repetitive application of a symbol of an eye, hand-painted in the artist’s signature free painterly manner. The symbolism not only invokes Kusama’s own unique hallucinatory perception of the world – in which everything seems interconnected and, as visualised in the present work, a multitude of simultaneous and paranoid experiences – but also invokes ancient symbolism. As the title  suggests, the eye has for millennia been used to protect from physical and spiritual evil, functioning an antidote to the fear of death. Epitomising Kusama’s signature artistic achievements in a captivating and symbolically loaded composition, Fear of Death stands as a powerful testament to her utterly unique artistic vision.