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Lot Essay
Handbag was the first work of Yayoi Kusama acquired by Mr. Katsunori and Mrs. Sayoko Hamada. Since that Special Selection Day Sale about 25 years ago, the couple has amassed an important collection of Kusama's works executed primarily on paper between the mid-1950s and early 1980s. Captivated by the gestures of the artist's brushstrokes and the intimacy in her works, the Hamadas built a collection that captures Kusama's journey between figurative and abstraction, dream and reality.
Lemon Tea (Lot 403), offered in the Day Sale, was a recent addition and is the only canvas work in the collection. Painted in 1981, it features a delicately intertwining lace-like image with swaths of impasto. Kusama's painstaking application of paint is the defining quality of this work. A meticulous, repeated web of blue, black and white pigments undulate, shimmer and pulsate across the canvas with a varying and hypnotic intensity. Larger, more dramatic swoops transform themselves into smaller, intensely knitted areas that ostensibly twist and turn with every stroke of the brush, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery. The concrete form of a glass of summer drink is transformed into an undivided space of sensorial effects, imbuing it with poetic resonance and enigmatic rhythm that is at once fragile, organic yet uninhibited.
Lemon Tea (Lot 403), offered in the Day Sale, was a recent addition and is the only canvas work in the collection. Painted in 1981, it features a delicately intertwining lace-like image with swaths of impasto. Kusama's painstaking application of paint is the defining quality of this work. A meticulous, repeated web of blue, black and white pigments undulate, shimmer and pulsate across the canvas with a varying and hypnotic intensity. Larger, more dramatic swoops transform themselves into smaller, intensely knitted areas that ostensibly twist and turn with every stroke of the brush, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery. The concrete form of a glass of summer drink is transformed into an undivided space of sensorial effects, imbuing it with poetic resonance and enigmatic rhythm that is at once fragile, organic yet uninhibited.