NZ & International Fine Art - Evening Sale Wednesday, 4 May 2022 - 6:00 PM start
Yayoi Kusama (Japanese b 1929) - A Pumpkin GB-D
Lot Details
Yayoi Kusama (Japanese b 1929) A Pumpkin GB-D screenprint on paper, limited edition 83/100 signed 'yayoi kusama' (lower right), inscribed with title and dated 1999 (lower centre) certificate of authenticity attached 20 x 27cm PROVENANCE purchased 云书房 (Yun Shu Fang) 2021 Private collection, Auckland Nicknamed ‘The Princess of Polka Dots’, Yayoi Kusama is a phenomenon. Despite spending the best part of five decades in a mental health facility, she is one of the most sort-after artists living today. Best known for her work in sculpture and installation, Kusama’s work expands into painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and more. At 10 years old Kusama began to experience hallucinations, with episodes involving bursts of light, talking flowers and vegetables. To ease her shock and fear Kusama began drawing and painting these experiences. At age 11, Kusama won the first of her many art prizes and accolades by painting a pumpkin that spoke to her during a hallucination. Pumpkins, dots and light experienced by Kusama in some of her earliest hallucinations have become the central components of her work. Through the use of dots Kusama examines ideas of infinity. Some of her most memorable installations are her mirror rooms. “Firefly’s on the Water” (2002) is an immersive experience, where one person at a time enters a darkened room lined with mirrors and lit by 150 small hanging lights. The viewer steps out onto a small viewing platform surrounded by shallow water. Alone, the viewer looks out through an expanding landscape, mirrors and water reflect thousands of tiny dots stretching and multiplying beyond comprehension. Kusama’s work is as playful as it is compelling and profound. She challenges our humanness, psychology, perception and mortality. Her repetition of forms, polka dots and mirrored rooms take on a cosmic significance – her works equally representing the grand and terrifying infinite universe as they portray tiny, microscopic cells. Her representations are an examination of how the universe and life within it can be thought of as infinitely huge or infinitely tiny.
