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拍品专文
“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, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots can't 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.” – Yayoi Kusama
In an endless plane of red and white, Yayoi Kusama’s Red Dots capture the viewer. Executed in 2011, the present lot is a stunning example of the artist’s extraordinary Dot series. This both delicate and monumental work appears from a distance almost monochromatic, but on closer inspection the intricacy of the surface becomes clear. Small, arched semi-circles of vivid red almost completely cover the surface of the canvas and appear to extend beyond the picture plane, enhancing the work's potential to expand ad infinitum. The meticulous circles present themselves with a hypnotic vitality. The vivid intensity of the bright red paint replicates Kusama's painstaking application of paint and begins to pulsate with energy, causing one's perception of figure and ground to fluctuate. Enveloping the viewer in a shimmering web, Kusama’s uncompromising vision can be seen in rhythmic formations, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery with every twist and turn of the brush.
Accordingly, these unsettled works find their beginnings in Kusama’s childhood growing up in a tumultuous Japan. Kusama endured grueling wartime experiences and was thereafter susceptible to hallucinations. With an immeasurable drive, she made the decision to journey to America to become an artist. She began corresponding with Georgia O’Keeffe who would inevitably inspire Kusama to make the move to America. “Staying in Japan was out of the question,” the artist recounted. “My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice... For art like mine – art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die – this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world” (Y. Kusama, quoted in M. Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in F. Morris, ed., Yayoi Kusama, London, 2012, p. 177). With this, she moved to New York and became an international sensation almost overnight. Here, she found an environment receptive to her ground-breaking works of art. Her long obsession with the infinite has endured until now, manifesting most prominently in her dot paintings. “Our earth is only one polka dot among millions of others. We must forget ourselves with polka dots. We must lose ourselves in the ever-advancing stream of eternity” (Y. Kusama, quoted in U. Kultermann, “Focus,” in Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 92).
Speaking of her dot paintings, Kusama describes them as the maturation of a long-anticipated desire to release a semi-cosmic vision of nature. They are the visualizations of powerful hallucinations that the artist has endured since her childhood, during which her visual field is obscured by an overlay of nets and dots. The nets appear as screens reducing her view of what lies beyond to specks or, in Kusama’s terms, "dots". She recalls how “the room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], 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 a reality” (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). These hallucinations led her to paint compulsively for hours on end, sometimes for up to 40 or 50 hours without eating or sleeping. Red Dots displays the process of its construction, making evident the meticulous care with which it was made, by repeated iterations of a single, simple gesture. There is an incessant quality in this gesture that is both obsessive and meditative, reflecting the intensity of the work’s inception. With its dizzying monotony and labor-intensive intricacy, the making of her obsessive work is both an act of self-obliteration and one of artistic transubstantiation. The physical self is erased only to be re-asserted in the artist’s signature patterns. As Kusama explained, “By obliterating one's individual self, one returns to the infinite universe” (Y. Kusama, quoted in G. Turner, “Yayoi Kusama,” in Bomb, no. 66, Winter 1999).
In an endless plane of red and white, Yayoi Kusama’s Red Dots capture the viewer. Executed in 2011, the present lot is a stunning example of the artist’s extraordinary Dot series. This both delicate and monumental work appears from a distance almost monochromatic, but on closer inspection the intricacy of the surface becomes clear. Small, arched semi-circles of vivid red almost completely cover the surface of the canvas and appear to extend beyond the picture plane, enhancing the work's potential to expand ad infinitum. The meticulous circles present themselves with a hypnotic vitality. The vivid intensity of the bright red paint replicates Kusama's painstaking application of paint and begins to pulsate with energy, causing one's perception of figure and ground to fluctuate. Enveloping the viewer in a shimmering web, Kusama’s uncompromising vision can be seen in rhythmic formations, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery with every twist and turn of the brush.
Accordingly, these unsettled works find their beginnings in Kusama’s childhood growing up in a tumultuous Japan. Kusama endured grueling wartime experiences and was thereafter susceptible to hallucinations. With an immeasurable drive, she made the decision to journey to America to become an artist. She began corresponding with Georgia O’Keeffe who would inevitably inspire Kusama to make the move to America. “Staying in Japan was out of the question,” the artist recounted. “My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice... For art like mine – art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die – this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world” (Y. Kusama, quoted in M. Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in F. Morris, ed., Yayoi Kusama, London, 2012, p. 177). With this, she moved to New York and became an international sensation almost overnight. Here, she found an environment receptive to her ground-breaking works of art. Her long obsession with the infinite has endured until now, manifesting most prominently in her dot paintings. “Our earth is only one polka dot among millions of others. We must forget ourselves with polka dots. We must lose ourselves in the ever-advancing stream of eternity” (Y. Kusama, quoted in U. Kultermann, “Focus,” in Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 92).
Speaking of her dot paintings, Kusama describes them as the maturation of a long-anticipated desire to release a semi-cosmic vision of nature. They are the visualizations of powerful hallucinations that the artist has endured since her childhood, during which her visual field is obscured by an overlay of nets and dots. The nets appear as screens reducing her view of what lies beyond to specks or, in Kusama’s terms, "dots". She recalls how “the room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], 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 a reality” (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). These hallucinations led her to paint compulsively for hours on end, sometimes for up to 40 or 50 hours without eating or sleeping. Red Dots displays the process of its construction, making evident the meticulous care with which it was made, by repeated iterations of a single, simple gesture. There is an incessant quality in this gesture that is both obsessive and meditative, reflecting the intensity of the work’s inception. With its dizzying monotony and labor-intensive intricacy, the making of her obsessive work is both an act of self-obliteration and one of artistic transubstantiation. The physical self is erased only to be re-asserted in the artist’s signature patterns. As Kusama explained, “By obliterating one's individual self, one returns to the infinite universe” (Y. Kusama, quoted in G. Turner, “Yayoi Kusama,” in Bomb, no. 66, Winter 1999).