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Lot Essay
Donald Judd described Yayoi Kusama as a true original, whose provocative sexual happenings and manically obsessive art brought a madcap dimension to the otherwise austere Minimalist arena of New York in the early 1960s. Largely overlooked in America following her return to Japan in the mid-1970s, her contribution is only now being reassessed thanks in part to a major touring retrospective in 1998, with venues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Kusuma arrived in New York in 1958 and quickly made a name for herself with the polka dot and mesh motifs of her Infinity Net paintings. She seemed at times desperate for publicity, but her sensationalist antics and shock tactics were underscored by deep friendships with serious artists such as Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd. After 1961, she experimented with different mediums in a quest to express the consuming notion of infinity. Dogged by mental illness, her work appeared to be driven by a neurotically compulsive quality, which formally married the all-over character of Jackson Pollock with the reductive aesthetic of a burgeoning Minimalist movement. Her mental condition gave her the physical stamina and the focus to cover huge surfaces with intricate, repetitive patterns.
Kusama's No. B, 3 is undoubtedly one of the most important works by the artist ever to come to auction. Executed in 1962 out of the ephemeral materials of egg crates and upholstery stuffing, Kusama creates a repetitive grid-like structure that seems almost organic in its strange and fragile physicality. In this way she pre-dates the sculptural developments of another famous woman artist, Eva Hesse, who similarly produced serial structures out of soft and irregular materials to create a highly personal idiom. As with the later wall sculptures of Hesse, No. B, 3 has a handmade quality and is labor intensive, providing a foil to the slick machine-manufactured structures championed by Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd.
Kusuma arrived in New York in 1958 and quickly made a name for herself with the polka dot and mesh motifs of her Infinity Net paintings. She seemed at times desperate for publicity, but her sensationalist antics and shock tactics were underscored by deep friendships with serious artists such as Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd. After 1961, she experimented with different mediums in a quest to express the consuming notion of infinity. Dogged by mental illness, her work appeared to be driven by a neurotically compulsive quality, which formally married the all-over character of Jackson Pollock with the reductive aesthetic of a burgeoning Minimalist movement. Her mental condition gave her the physical stamina and the focus to cover huge surfaces with intricate, repetitive patterns.
Kusama's No. B, 3 is undoubtedly one of the most important works by the artist ever to come to auction. Executed in 1962 out of the ephemeral materials of egg crates and upholstery stuffing, Kusama creates a repetitive grid-like structure that seems almost organic in its strange and fragile physicality. In this way she pre-dates the sculptural developments of another famous woman artist, Eva Hesse, who similarly produced serial structures out of soft and irregular materials to create a highly personal idiom. As with the later wall sculptures of Hesse, No. B, 3 has a handmade quality and is labor intensive, providing a foil to the slick machine-manufactured structures championed by Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd.