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Lot Essay
‘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’ (Yayoi Kusama)
With its solitary eyeball emblazoned against a field of dazzling red dots, Hitomi (Eye) (1989) is a hypnotic work that draws together some of Yayoi Kusama’s most important motifs. Rendered in luminous tones of neon and gold, the work combines the webbed structures of her celebrated early Infinity Nets with the iconic, Pop-like imagery that came to define her triumphant return to painting during the 1980s. As a child, Kusama experienced vivid hallucinations in which vast swathes of dots subsumed her entire being. In her paintings, she translated these visions into complex, optical fields, whose finely-wrought surfaces provided the artist with a cathartic outlet for her psychological turmoil. The eye became a central subject in Kusama’s art, gazing out at the viewer as if from the very depths of her soul. In the present work, its entire structure is awash with dots and lattices: a portrait, perhaps, of her own perceptual theatre. Three mouths float below, their lips tightly sealed.
Kusama’s practice took flight after she moved to the United States in 1957, arriving in Seattle before moving to New York the following year. Her Infinity Nets, first shown in 1959, propelled her to international acclaim. With their countless repetitive dots set in lacy arcs, these works were direct manifestations of her own interior world. ‘The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns]’, she recalls, ‘my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and absolute space’ (Y. Kusama quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). Meticulous, repetitive and entirely absorbing, the process of making these works allowed Kusama to escape the painful trappings of her own body and mind. They were cosmological in scope, redolent of galaxies and constellations proliferating to infinity. Earth, she wrote, is but ‘one polka-dot among a million stars’ (Y. Kusama, ‘Infinity’, in Yayoi Kusama: 1945-Now, exh. cat. M+, Hong Kong 2022, p. 42).
The present work dates from a watershed moment in Kusama’s career. In 1973 she had returned to Japan, and largely withdrew from her studio practice following a period of protracted mental illness. Over the course of the 1980s, however, she returned to painting with renewed energy. Though still bound to the abstract language of her dots, webs and nets, Kusama also began to embrace bold figurative imagery, including plants and animals as well as eyes. She started to use acrylic paint, which lent her canvases a captivating shimmer. During this period the artist began to garner international recognition once more. Her work had not been widely exhibited in the United States until 1989—the year of the present work—when she mounted a retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York. The exhibition helped to reintroduce Kusama to the art world that she had previously left behind, as well as the wider American public.
Hitomi also invokes lessons Kusama had absorbed in New York, namely the ‘all-over’ gestures of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and Pop’s deadpan approach to its subjects. Looking back further still, the work is also decidedly surreal in its sensibilities. For the Surrealists, who sought to give image to veiled dreams and desires, eyes served as a window onto the unconscious. In their pictures, as in Hitomi, the eyeball functions both as an object to be looked at as well as a portal for viewing itself: a means of seeing and being seen simultaneously, and a tool for revealing the hidden. Hitomi filters these ideas through Kusama’s deeply personal practice to embrace the healing power of art. ‘By obliterating one’s individual self,’ she explains, ‘one returns to the infinite universe’ (Y. Kusama quoted in G. Turner, ‘Yayoi Kusama’, Bomb, vol. 66, Winter 1999).
With its solitary eyeball emblazoned against a field of dazzling red dots, Hitomi (Eye) (1989) is a hypnotic work that draws together some of Yayoi Kusama’s most important motifs. Rendered in luminous tones of neon and gold, the work combines the webbed structures of her celebrated early Infinity Nets with the iconic, Pop-like imagery that came to define her triumphant return to painting during the 1980s. As a child, Kusama experienced vivid hallucinations in which vast swathes of dots subsumed her entire being. In her paintings, she translated these visions into complex, optical fields, whose finely-wrought surfaces provided the artist with a cathartic outlet for her psychological turmoil. The eye became a central subject in Kusama’s art, gazing out at the viewer as if from the very depths of her soul. In the present work, its entire structure is awash with dots and lattices: a portrait, perhaps, of her own perceptual theatre. Three mouths float below, their lips tightly sealed.
Kusama’s practice took flight after she moved to the United States in 1957, arriving in Seattle before moving to New York the following year. Her Infinity Nets, first shown in 1959, propelled her to international acclaim. With their countless repetitive dots set in lacy arcs, these works were direct manifestations of her own interior world. ‘The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns]’, she recalls, ‘my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and absolute space’ (Y. Kusama quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). Meticulous, repetitive and entirely absorbing, the process of making these works allowed Kusama to escape the painful trappings of her own body and mind. They were cosmological in scope, redolent of galaxies and constellations proliferating to infinity. Earth, she wrote, is but ‘one polka-dot among a million stars’ (Y. Kusama, ‘Infinity’, in Yayoi Kusama: 1945-Now, exh. cat. M+, Hong Kong 2022, p. 42).
The present work dates from a watershed moment in Kusama’s career. In 1973 she had returned to Japan, and largely withdrew from her studio practice following a period of protracted mental illness. Over the course of the 1980s, however, she returned to painting with renewed energy. Though still bound to the abstract language of her dots, webs and nets, Kusama also began to embrace bold figurative imagery, including plants and animals as well as eyes. She started to use acrylic paint, which lent her canvases a captivating shimmer. During this period the artist began to garner international recognition once more. Her work had not been widely exhibited in the United States until 1989—the year of the present work—when she mounted a retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York. The exhibition helped to reintroduce Kusama to the art world that she had previously left behind, as well as the wider American public.
Hitomi also invokes lessons Kusama had absorbed in New York, namely the ‘all-over’ gestures of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and Pop’s deadpan approach to its subjects. Looking back further still, the work is also decidedly surreal in its sensibilities. For the Surrealists, who sought to give image to veiled dreams and desires, eyes served as a window onto the unconscious. In their pictures, as in Hitomi, the eyeball functions both as an object to be looked at as well as a portal for viewing itself: a means of seeing and being seen simultaneously, and a tool for revealing the hidden. Hitomi filters these ideas through Kusama’s deeply personal practice to embrace the healing power of art. ‘By obliterating one’s individual self,’ she explains, ‘one returns to the infinite universe’ (Y. Kusama quoted in G. Turner, ‘Yayoi Kusama’, Bomb, vol. 66, Winter 1999).