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Lot Essay
'A polka dot has the form of the sun which is the symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon which is calm, round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots cant stay alone, like the communicative life of people. Two and three and more polka dots become movement. Our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment, I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in love'.
(Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), &IYayoi Kusama, London 2003, p. 124).
Executed on a grand scale, Yayoi Kusama's Dots is a striking example of the artist's iconic polka dot motif. As though a plane of vibrating crimson molecules, in the present work red polka dots emerge out of an alabaster ground creating a mesmerising, hypnotic field that draws the eye deep into the piece. Within the artist's oeuvre red is the colour that she returned to repeatedly. For Kusama the colour held unique qualities that resonated with her on both an artistic and personal level, enabling her to produce a work of incredible power and intensity. Red had a particular significance for Kusama because, according to Japanese folk tradition, it is the colour for expelling demons and illness. Tracing the origins of her fixation with repetitive polka dots, the artist recalls a series of hallucinatory episodes when she was ten years old: 'one day, looking at a red flower-patterned table cloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts. The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an illusion but reality' (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London 2003, pp. 36-37).
Having returned to Japan from America in the early 1970s, by 1977 the overwhelming visual hallucinations that had tormented Kusama's youth resumed. Voluntarily, the artist committed herself to hospital for her psychological ailments, where she still continues to live. It was from Japan in the 1990s that Kusama orchestrated and propelled herself onto the international stage following her inclusion in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Speaking of the interesting dialogue between America and Japan in Kusama's work, Donald Judd observed, '[her work] transcends the question of whether [the art] is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent' (D. Judd, quoted in L. Zelevansky, 'Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York', Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, exh. cat., LACMA, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 12).
(Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), &IYayoi Kusama, London 2003, p. 124).
Executed on a grand scale, Yayoi Kusama's Dots is a striking example of the artist's iconic polka dot motif. As though a plane of vibrating crimson molecules, in the present work red polka dots emerge out of an alabaster ground creating a mesmerising, hypnotic field that draws the eye deep into the piece. Within the artist's oeuvre red is the colour that she returned to repeatedly. For Kusama the colour held unique qualities that resonated with her on both an artistic and personal level, enabling her to produce a work of incredible power and intensity. Red had a particular significance for Kusama because, according to Japanese folk tradition, it is the colour for expelling demons and illness. Tracing the origins of her fixation with repetitive polka dots, the artist recalls a series of hallucinatory episodes when she was ten years old: 'one day, looking at a red flower-patterned table cloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts. The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an illusion but reality' (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London 2003, pp. 36-37).
Having returned to Japan from America in the early 1970s, by 1977 the overwhelming visual hallucinations that had tormented Kusama's youth resumed. Voluntarily, the artist committed herself to hospital for her psychological ailments, where she still continues to live. It was from Japan in the 1990s that Kusama orchestrated and propelled herself onto the international stage following her inclusion in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Speaking of the interesting dialogue between America and Japan in Kusama's work, Donald Judd observed, '[her work] transcends the question of whether [the art] is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent' (D. Judd, quoted in L. Zelevansky, 'Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York', Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, exh. cat., LACMA, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 12).