Yayoi Kusama. The name almost needs no further elaboration, such its power. An artist who has crossed, demolished and defined the boundaries of art for the last 70 years, her oeuvre has been hallmarked by a rejection of limitation to medium, generation or movement. Pumpkin Chess Set is a unique work in an artist’s career, stemming from a small edition of only 7 plus 4 artist’s proofs. Here, Kusama incorporates the most defining motifs of her practice: a dexterity of geometric patterns, and pumpkins. Taking basic concepts from her feted Infinity Nets series, she employs them within a three dimensional plane to supplant them onto the mimicked contours of a pumpkin.
The repeated use of spots through the sculpture holds profound resonance, and functions as an organ for her automatic reactions between her psyche and the materiality of her work. A storied example of the thin line between genius and madness, Kusama is diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis; as such her world is populated with schizophrenic hallucinations, panic attacks, psychological distress, and suicide attempts.
Her intensive art practice acts as a form of self-therapy, a way to mediate the trauma of the everyday and a process that she calls ‘self-obliteration’. Though important to note, understand, and internalise, relegating her work to the musings of a mental patient is reductive – wrong. What instead should be celebrated is Kusama’s ability to tap into the depths of her identity and open the door into a mind quite unlike any other in the world. This is a conversation within Kusama herself that we should feel privileged to attend, and in which to indulge; a conversation the present lot presents a lighter chapter.
The inclusion of a chess board on top of the half-sliced pumpkin lends the work a mode of the surreal, as if it were a table set for two opponents to engage in strategic battle – the pieces remaining in their starting positions. Shades of absurdism creep into the sculpture as we picture ourselves sitting down to play a classic game of chess atop a pumpkin – embodying the father of conceptualism, Marcel Duchamp’s decree that, “while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists”.
Universally recognised as one of the most important artists of our time, Kusama’s work forms part of extensive museum collections throughout the world. This includes the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
She has recently been the subject of a landmark retrospective at M+ Museum in Hong Kong to celebrate the institution’s first birthday.
Having been honoured with extensive solo exhibitions throughout her career, including the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, Kusama continues to affirm her position as a leading contemporary artist. She has recently presented a retrospective at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (23 April – 15 August 2021), and an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden (10 April – 31 October 2021). Kusama recently also had a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London and the Rubell Museum in Miami last year.