'In this universe, the moon, the sun, each and every star, my own life, your life, they are all a single polka dot among billions. I have love and awe towards all these things. I want to send my earnest wish of overcoming conflicts and terrors of the world, the wish of peace for the people.'
- Yayoi Kusama
Born in Japan in 1929, Yayoi Kusama has been at the forefront of the avant-garde for over half a century. Her instantly recognisable motifs of polka-dots and pumpkins explore themes of psychedelia, repetition, and obsessive patterning. Many of these images originate in her recording of the vivid hallucinations that she has experienced since early childhood: following a breakdown on her return from New York to Japan, in 1977 she was voluntarily admitted to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she has remained ever since. The botanical and organic forms that pervade her aesthetic also make reference to her family’s background as seedling merchants, infusing minimalist form with autobiographical significance.
In one of her early literary works, Kusama writes that ‘a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement ... Polka dots are a way to infinity.’ (Yayoi Kusama, Manhattan jisatsu misui joshuan [Manhattan Suicide Addict],Tokyo: Kosakuha, 1978). The present lot is an excellent example of the mysterious and dynamic sensory power of these shapes, a rhythmic undulation enacting the calm and focus that they offer in Kusama’s restless psychological landscape. Kusama is sharply critical of the lack of support for contemporary art in her native Japan, where she was declared a ‘national disgrace’ for her nude happenings in 1960s New York; now cherished as a vital voice in conceptual art, her unique worldview persists exuberantly to this day.