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Lot Essay
Painted in 2003, Dots Obsession (QTW) is a spectacular example of Yayoi Kusama’s fantastica visual idiom. Advancing and escalating the look of the early dot paintings she made in the 1950s, Dots Obsession is a complex web of silvery, atomised spheres. Shimmering against a darkened ground, the endless dots, infinitely reproducible, stream across the canvas; it is a depthless, boundless world filled entirely with metallic dots that seem to grow, extend and stretch beyond the limits of the canvas. First appearing in the drawings she created at the age of ten, the polka dots are directly inspired by the hallucinations she experienced as a child. Recalling her complete submission to the vision, she said ‘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). Everything, including her own corporeal self, undergoes a process of what she has referred to as ‘self-obliteration’, represented in the dizzying, vertiginous sensation of the present work.
Kusama left Japan in her mid-twenties, moving to New York City to further her art practice. There she plunged headfirst into the avant-garde scene, befriending artists including Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd, among others, figures whose practices, similarly, proposed radical new ways of seeing. For her first exhibition in New York, held at the Brata Gallery in 1959, Kusama debuted her white Infinity Net paintings which were suffused with discrete dots secreted inside of lacy arcs. Reviewing the 1959 exhibition Judd wrote, ‘Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent” (Donald Judd, ‘Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month- Yayoi Kusama,’ Artnews vol. 58, no. 6, n. p.). For Kusama, all art grew from the polka dot, and the form became an enduring fixation – and personal emblem – which she constantly altered and manipulated in new and daring ways. Painted in grisaille in the present work, the holographic, psychedelic effects of Dots Obsession reveal the endlessly incarnating optical illusion in all its permutations. Simple in its geometry, the work is nevertheless psychologically and visually complex, asserting her obsessions, as suggested by the title, ultimately centring on a personal experience of the world. Kusam’s dots continue to entrance viewers, and within her energetic, vibrating web exists a swelling individualised hymn.
Kusama left Japan in her mid-twenties, moving to New York City to further her art practice. There she plunged headfirst into the avant-garde scene, befriending artists including Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd, among others, figures whose practices, similarly, proposed radical new ways of seeing. For her first exhibition in New York, held at the Brata Gallery in 1959, Kusama debuted her white Infinity Net paintings which were suffused with discrete dots secreted inside of lacy arcs. Reviewing the 1959 exhibition Judd wrote, ‘Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent” (Donald Judd, ‘Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month- Yayoi Kusama,’ Artnews vol. 58, no. 6, n. p.). For Kusama, all art grew from the polka dot, and the form became an enduring fixation – and personal emblem – which she constantly altered and manipulated in new and daring ways. Painted in grisaille in the present work, the holographic, psychedelic effects of Dots Obsession reveal the endlessly incarnating optical illusion in all its permutations. Simple in its geometry, the work is nevertheless psychologically and visually complex, asserting her obsessions, as suggested by the title, ultimately centring on a personal experience of the world. Kusam’s dots continue to entrance viewers, and within her energetic, vibrating web exists a swelling individualised hymn.