YAYOI KUSAMA

(B. 1929)

Fruits
1996

Footnotes

This work is accompanied by a registration card issued by Yayoi Kusama Inc., Tokyo.

Provenance
Private Collection, Japan
Acquired from the above by the present owner



Throughout the course of her distinguished career, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has developed a practice which, whilst sharing affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop Art, ZERO and Nul, fights to resist any singular categorisation. Fruit baskets have served as a recurring subject in Kusama's works and Fruits, executed in 1996, follows her fundamental concept of Infinity Nets with the multiplex addition of her iconic dots and organic symbols. The intricate geometric arrangement of the background, fruit basket, and tabletop in the present painting illustrates her logic behind the spatial relationship. Fruits attests to her own artistic enhancement, while epitomising her creative practice since its earliest days.

The basket is set against a turquoise background covered with an infinite net of black-outlined triangles. The delicate fine lines stretch and connect in a seemingly unconscious manner, leaving the viewer in a trance between figurative and abstract representations. The fruits in the basket are painted in bold colours using visually directional dots arranged in a concentric pattern, reminiscent of her widely identifiable Pumpkins. Kusama's motif of the pumpkin form has achieved an almost mythical status in her art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash growing in the fields that surrounded her childhood home, and the pumpkin continues to occupy a special place in her body of work.

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, Kusama studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s. By the mid-1960s, she had become well known for her avant-garde activities and exhibitions with her diverse artistic endeavours spanning categories such as painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation, and environmental art as well as literature and fashion. Her use of an innovative perspective and her navigation of the cultural contexts of both the East and the West has enabled her to become an internationally renowned artist. Today, Yayoi Kusama who lives, somewhat famously, in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, continues to produce paintings and installations at an incredible speed, exhibiting internationally in nearly every corner of the globe and maintaining a commanding presence and demand on the primary art market and at auction.

From a young age, Yayoi Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations and consequently began creating net and polka dot pattern pictures. Those hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to influence her art throughout her career. From 1951 to 1957, Kusama created thousands of paintings and drawings on paper, further establishing these two significant motifs of dots and nets. In 1957, she went to the United States and began making net paintings and soft sculptures, as well developing installations that made use of mirrors and lights. It was in 1959 that Yayoi Kusama held her first solo exhibition in New York showcasing a series of white Infinity Net paintings that achieved critical acclaim. Her debut stirred heated discussions among artists in the United States, at a time where Abstract Expressionismwas prevalent. The organic shapes in her work created during the 1950s could be identified as evocative of surrealist artworks by the likes of Joan Miró and Paul Klee, yet they appear in a more obscure, colourful, playful, and neurotic form. By breaking the world up into nets and dots, Kusama eliminates physical boundaries and constructs a well-developed concept of repetition and multiplication.

Named previously as 'the world's most popular artist', it's not hard to see why Yayoi Kusama continues to impress art audiences of all ages around the globe. In 1993, she represented her country in the 45th Venice Biennale and 2017 saw the inauguration of Kusama's museum in Tokyo. Recent exhibitions include the debut of 'Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors' at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., 'Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of Rainbow' at the National Gallery Singapore, and the concurrent exhibitions 'Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life' and 'Yayoi Kusama Infinity Nets' at David Zwirner in New York.
Today, Kusama's works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among many others.