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Lot Essay
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, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement ... Polka dots are a way to infinity.
Yayoi Kusama
In Dots, myriad of black polka dots float against a red background. Repetitive, hallucinating and mesmerizing – Yayoi Kusama’s iconic style of painting creates a rhythmic pattern across the work. First appearing in her drawings around the age of ten, polka dots and Kusama’s continued fixation with them persisted over five decades, becoming a personal emblem in her artistic career. In this work, dots of different size fill up the canvas and continue to expand beyond the pictorial space, which creates an overwhelming visual experience and illustrates the artist’s notion of infinity.
Directly inspired by the hallucinations caused by her childhood trauma, the intensity of the work is striking. In Kusama’s vision, everything, including herself, undergoes a process of “self-obliteration” and revolts in a space of patterns and dots. The work fully captures the dizzy sensation of Kusama’s hallucinatory episodes. The strong contrast between red and black further heightens the psychedelic effect of the work. By describing her paintings as “art medicine”, Kusama’s work has an inextricable relationship with her mental illness and painting has played an almost therapeutic role in her life. By obsessively revisiting those daunting experiences, Kusama seeks to relieve and exorcise her fears and anxieties through repetition.
Kusama is certainly not the only artist who falls into the allures of circles and dots. In the 1960s and 70s, op artist Victor Vasarely painted several paintings using rows of dots to produce disturbing visual effects. In Vasarely’s CTA-104-E, the artist creates an optical illusion of spatial recession by manipulating the chromatic density of the equally spaced discs. Vasarely’s graphical representation of patterned forms suggests that he is less concerned about emotional expression than the physiology and psychology of perception. In contrast, Kusama’s idiosyncratic work asserts her obsessions and is ultimately centred on her personal experience, which opposes the pure geometric language of op art. Simple in form yet complex in its visual and psychological language, Kusama’s work continues to hypnotize her viewers into a world of infinity.
Yayoi Kusama
In Dots, myriad of black polka dots float against a red background. Repetitive, hallucinating and mesmerizing – Yayoi Kusama’s iconic style of painting creates a rhythmic pattern across the work. First appearing in her drawings around the age of ten, polka dots and Kusama’s continued fixation with them persisted over five decades, becoming a personal emblem in her artistic career. In this work, dots of different size fill up the canvas and continue to expand beyond the pictorial space, which creates an overwhelming visual experience and illustrates the artist’s notion of infinity.
Directly inspired by the hallucinations caused by her childhood trauma, the intensity of the work is striking. In Kusama’s vision, everything, including herself, undergoes a process of “self-obliteration” and revolts in a space of patterns and dots. The work fully captures the dizzy sensation of Kusama’s hallucinatory episodes. The strong contrast between red and black further heightens the psychedelic effect of the work. By describing her paintings as “art medicine”, Kusama’s work has an inextricable relationship with her mental illness and painting has played an almost therapeutic role in her life. By obsessively revisiting those daunting experiences, Kusama seeks to relieve and exorcise her fears and anxieties through repetition.
Kusama is certainly not the only artist who falls into the allures of circles and dots. In the 1960s and 70s, op artist Victor Vasarely painted several paintings using rows of dots to produce disturbing visual effects. In Vasarely’s CTA-104-E, the artist creates an optical illusion of spatial recession by manipulating the chromatic density of the equally spaced discs. Vasarely’s graphical representation of patterned forms suggests that he is less concerned about emotional expression than the physiology and psychology of perception. In contrast, Kusama’s idiosyncratic work asserts her obsessions and is ultimately centred on her personal experience, which opposes the pure geometric language of op art. Simple in form yet complex in its visual and psychological language, Kusama’s work continues to hypnotize her viewers into a world of infinity.