PROVENANCE:

Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo

EXHIBITED:

Beauty in Japanese, Marble Palace, The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, September 2 - 27, 2010

Yayoi Kusama, Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo, March 9 - May 9, 2011

This painting is to be sold with a registration card issued by Yayoi Kusama Studio, Tokyo.

World-renowned artist Yayoi Kusama returned to Tokyo in 1973 with her illness. During her time in New York, she was often taken to hospital for exhaustion after 40-50 hours of being completely engrossed in her work. She described herself as an obsessive artist. Every time she started applying "nets" and "dots" on a monochrome canvas, she could not stop. Therefore, after returning to Japan, she worked mainly on novels, essays, and poems, and volunteered to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo she still visits from time to time.

In 1993, Kusama represented Japan in the 45th Venice Biennale. Since then, she became famous for her works on pumpkins and was invited to create large installations, such as the outdoor sculpture at Fukuoka Municipal Museum. The subject of "pumpkins" came from her childhood. During the war, her family planted pumpkins at home. She said, "As a child, I used to play in the garden at home. The pumpkins that I plucked out would talk to me." "Pumpkins have such lovely shapes... What attracts me are their unpowdered big bellies and their strong sense of security."

Kusama has a partiality for dots due to her hallucinatory visions. She covers the surfaces of all kinds of materials - walls, floors, canvases, objects, human bodies, and even herself - in dots. And by expanding dots into infinity through repeated lines, her work confounds the existence of real space, bringing the viewers into unconscious states of dizziness, not knowing whether they are in reality or illusions. This painting, "Pumpkin B.Q.I.", composed of repeating dots, combines two of her most iconic symbols – "pumpkins" and "infinity nets."