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拍品专文
In this Untitled from 1970, also given to Dr Maarten Reinink by the artist after her stay at his estate, Yayoi Kusama uses the sunflower as a central icon around which she constructs a vision of interconnected infinitude. One of the few figurative Kusama paintings in existence, the painting exudes an effervescent energy; the bright, tonally consistent palette of red, blue, yellow, green and white gives the work a psychedelic purity of tone, while the flower itself is realised with a vivacious exuberance, the lines almost bouncing on the canvas. The canvas flooded with pattern, an intricate web of interlocking and overlapping motifs seems to bleed across the lines of the flower and into the world outside, the snaking lines, polka dots, and nets of smaller points embodying Kusama’s sense of an infinite, contiguous reality in which everything is connected.
In the oeuvre of Kusama, a body of work dominated by series’ of sprawling patterns, the flower is a particularly important motif – despite the rarity of a figurative painting of this nature. Kusama has returned to them, in various guises and across mediums, several times since she began painting them in the 1950s; one of her most recent project was a series of large-scale plastic sculptures begun in 2009 entitled Flowers that Bloom at Midnight. With their naturally repeating forms and rich symbolic resonances flowers seem to possess innate affinities with the artist’s work, but Kusama also has a particularly personal relationship with the image of the flower; as she tells it, it was at the centre of the childhood psychological experience that is the fundament of her artistic practice. ‘One day’, she has said, ‘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 absolute space. This was not an illusion but reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, pp. 35-36). The flower, then, was apparently the first motif through which Kusama envisioned the notions of self-obliteration, spiritual unity and the infinite that lie at the centre of her art.
In the oeuvre of Kusama, a body of work dominated by series’ of sprawling patterns, the flower is a particularly important motif – despite the rarity of a figurative painting of this nature. Kusama has returned to them, in various guises and across mediums, several times since she began painting them in the 1950s; one of her most recent project was a series of large-scale plastic sculptures begun in 2009 entitled Flowers that Bloom at Midnight. With their naturally repeating forms and rich symbolic resonances flowers seem to possess innate affinities with the artist’s work, but Kusama also has a particularly personal relationship with the image of the flower; as she tells it, it was at the centre of the childhood psychological experience that is the fundament of her artistic practice. ‘One day’, she has said, ‘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 absolute space. This was not an illusion but reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, pp. 35-36). The flower, then, was apparently the first motif through which Kusama envisioned the notions of self-obliteration, spiritual unity and the infinite that lie at the centre of her art.