Lot 1055
  • 1055

KUSAMA YAYOI | Pumpkin (PLOE)

Estimate
10,000,000 - 20,000,000 HKD
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Description

  • Yayoi Kusama
  • Pumpkin (PLOE)
  • acrylic on canvas
  • 130.3 by 162 cm; 51⅜ by 63¾ in.
signed and titled in English and dated 2013 on the reverse

Provenance

Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Acquired from the above by the present owner This work is accompanied with an artwork registration card issued by the artist's studio

Catalogue Note

Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted even having to take time to sleep.

Kusama Yayoi

I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality and form. My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues. I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child.

Kusama Yayoi




Magnificently resplendent, majestic in scale and breathtakingly spectacular in its unequivocally consummate and impeccable technical execution, Pumpkin (PLOE) is the single most exceptional pumpkin painting by Kusama Yayoi ever to appear on the auction market. In the background, Kusama’s all-over scaled tessellations – an iconic iteration of the artist’s most distinctive infinity net motif employed often within her pumpkin paintings – are so tightly, delicately and dexterously woven that the canvas almost hums with the rhythmic intensity of the pattern. The pumpkin itself, hovering tumescent, anthropomorphic and brilliantly luminous within the centre of the painting, presents the legendary artist at the absolute height of her powers: each gleamingly moist circle shimmers, glistens and vibrates; each compulsively, meticulously crafted row of multi-striated dots throbs and slithers fluidly down the body of the gourd; and the entire pumpkin pulsates with a singular vital dynamism driven by the extraordinary vision that defines Kusama’s epochal era-defining career. Flawless and supremely unparalleled in terms of quality of execution and the disorienting yet mesmerizing complexity of pattern and form, Pumpkin (PLOE) is an undeniable magnum opus of one of the most legendary figures of contemporary art.

As universally emblematic of Kusama’s oeuvre as the Campbell’s soup can was to Andy Warhol’s, the pumpkin is deeply central to the artist’s psyche, and its origins within her art can be traced back to her most early years. In 1948, three years after the war ended, a 19-year-old Kusama enrolled in a fourth-year course at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. “During my time in Kyoto I diligently painted pumpkins”, wrote the artist, “which in later years would become an important theme in my art” (Kusama Yayoi, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Tate Publishing, 2011, p. 75). Kusama recalls having consumed the vegetable endlessly to the point of nausea in her childhood years during and after the war; in spite of this, she retains a fond attachment to its organic bulbous form, describing it as embodying a “generous unpretentiousness” and “solid spiritual balance” (Ibid., p. 76). Already experiencing hallucinations at the time, involving pumpkins that spoke to her in a most animated manner, Kusama found the gourd a benign and nurturing subject – as opposed to the more traumatic and menacing feelings she associates with flowers, plants and objects that plagued her throughout her life.

Kusama’s early pumpkins were painted with traditional Nihonga materials, which she left behind after her move from Matsumoto to New York in 1958. Within only eighteen months of her arrival, Kusama stunned the New York art scene with her radical Infinity Nets in 1959, executed in the Western medium of oil, which were followed by her Accumulation soft sculptures in 1961. In 1965 Kusama infused explosions of colour into her sculptures through the use of dotted and striped fabrics; by this time, the sheer breadth, scale and ambition of her diverse cross-media oeuvre had taken over the city like an epidemic. Her ubiquitous polka-dot and net motifs, manifested in mesmeric paintings, immersive rooms, hypnotic installations, body art and participatory performances, forged a wholly unique aesthetic that articulated a rigorous, overwhelming language of obsession and obliteration – a language that enabled the artist to combat her hallucinatory mental illness. The artist reflects: “I use my complexes and fears as subjects. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration’” (Kusama Yayoi, cited in Mignon Nixon, ‘Infinity Politics’, in Francis Morris (ed.), Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2012, p. 180).

After an explosive rise to fame in New York in the 1960s, Kusama retreated into a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1975, withdrawing into a period of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing a prolific body of work. It was during this time that Kusama revisited her earlier pumpkin motif, combining her signature all-over Nets and obliterating polka-dot aesthetic with the theme of her favourite gourd. During the 1980s Kusama explored colourful variations of her pumpkin-pattern in two-dimensional paintings, drawings and prints; over the years her rendering of pumpkin ‘skin’ grew ever more deft and accomplished, with the flowing lines of dots advancing and receding rhythmically in a fastidiously precise yet dynamically organic manner. Even the seemingly blank or ‘undotted’ segments are overlaid with miniscule specks, contributing to a complex and intensely laborious configuration that pulsates and disorients with energy akin to that of Op art paintings.

Towards the latter half of the 1980s, Kusama began exhibiting more frequently at exhibitions around the world. Appreciation for Kusama’s work grew steadily, and in 1993, her international revival was made official when she was invited as the first solo artist and first woman ever to grace the Japanese pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale. For the occasion, Kusama constructed Mirror Room (Pumpkin), consuming the entire interior of the pavilion in an immersive floor-to-ceiling extravaganza of black-on-yellow polka dots. At its centre was a dazzling mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures, echoing her seminal 1966 Infinity Mirror Room—Love Forever whilst introducing the theme of the pumpkin. Tatehata Akira, the commissioner of the Japanese Pavilion, also organized a mini-retrospective of Kusama’s career to accompany the newly commissioned installation. Five years later in 1998, coinciding with the creation of the present two lots, another major milestone was reached when Kusama became subject of the defining solo exhibition “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998, which subsequently travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The present Pumpkin (PLOE) was created in 2013, by which time Kusama had become a global household name. The artist’s international resurgence and rise to global stardom occurred in parallel with – and was inextricably tied with – her iconic pumpkin motif. It was to pumpkins that Kusama turned for solace during her period of reclusion, and it was with pumpkins in mind that she set about creating a work for her momentous Venice Biennale comeback. The pumpkin stands as a symbol of triumph for the artist’s personal as well as artistic rebirth, representing a mediation of the artist’s psychiatric illness that went hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing sophistication, dexterity and creativity of her creations. As Alexandra Munroe writes, Kusama’s art requires her “not only to surrender to madness but also to triumph over it; trauma must be substantially transformed before it can communicate to others as beauty and meaning” (Alexandra Munroe, ‘Between Heaven and earth: The Literary Art of Yayoi Kusama’, in Exh. Cat. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998, p. 81).