Yayoi Kusma

Yayoi Kusama, (born March 22, 1929, Matsumoto, Japan), Japanese artist who was a self-described “obsessional artist,” known for her extensive use of polka dots and for her infinity installations. She employed painting, sculpture, performance art, and installations in a variety of styles, including Pop art and Minimalism.

 

By her own account, Kusama began painting as a child, at about the time she began experiencing hallucinations that often involved fields of dots. Those hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to inform her art throughout her career. She had little formal training, studying art only briefly (1948–49) at the Kyōto City Specialist School of Arts. Family conflict and the desire to become an artist drove her to move in 1957 to the United States, where she settled in New York City. Before leaving Japan, she destroyed many of her early paintings. Obsessive repetition continued to be a theme in Kusama’s sculpture and installation art, which she began to exhibit in the early 1960s. The theme of sexual anxiety linked much of that work, in which Kusama covered the surface of objects, such as an armchair in Accumulation No. 1 (1962), with small soft phallic sculptures constructed from white fabric. Installations from that time included Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965), a mirrored room whose floors were covered with hundreds of stuffed phalli that had been painted with red dots. Mirrors gave her the opportunity to create infinite planes in her installations, and she would continue to use them in later pieces.

Yayoi Kusma’s Flowers is an Screenprint made in 1985. These prints have become very rare. It is Numbered 18 out of 100 Editions. It’s also titled and signed on the lower white border. The Sheet measures 53.3 x 61.3 cm. (21 x 24 1/8 in.). The Artwork has had three previous owners. It does not have a Foundation Certificate, as many Editions do not, as well as the Foundation recently voiding all existing Certificates. It is also featured in Yayoi Kusama: Prints 1979-2017: ABE Publishing Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, 2017: plate no. 87, p. 58)