Painted in 2015, the present work reflects renowned artist Yayoi Kusama’s continued investigation of the compulsive nature of her being and the quasi-psychedelic manner in which she is able to publicly relate her experiences through painting. She traces the roots of her distinctive repetitive style back to her traumatic childhood, when she began to experience a specific series of hallucinations. As Kusama has said, “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.” (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2013, p. 60)
These psychological undertones are palpable in a series of paintings begun in 2009 titled My Eternal Soul, to which the present lot belongs. Featuring a vibrant spectrum of colors and abstract, organic forms, these large-scale paintings are all-encompassing. Painted in fluorescent orange with cerulean blue designs and black polka dots, Far End of Disappointment creates a dynamic, optical effect which, as Mika Yoshitake declares, “reveals Kusama’s tremendous capacity to access her body memory. With lack of premeditation and her practice of letting her hand lead the way, she has, in phenomenological terms, trained her body to acquire its own sense of memory, which is cumulative and gradual in character and thus thrives on repetition” (Mika Yoshitake, “Infinity Mirrors: Doors of Perception” in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2017, p. 31). Indeed, the repeated motifs of cilia-like forms in this work can be traced back to earlier works in the artist’s prolific oeuvre, which have become even more prevalent in her recurring visual vocabulary in recent years. Recently exhibited at David Zwirner in an exhibition of paintings and sculpture called Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love in 2015, and illustrated in the monograph accompanying the celebrated 2017 exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum, the present lot is a testament to the hallmarks of the artist’s renowned painting practice, one that is ongoing and ever more relevant.