YAYOI KUSAMA

(B. 1929)

Dots Obsession
1997

Footnotes

Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Exhibited
Greensboro, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Inquiring Eyes: Greensboro Collects, 2010


A shimmering palette of sparkling gold, Dots Obsession (1997) is a captivating example of Yayoi Kusama's most instantly recognizable motif, and presents an opportunity to acquire a highly personal and stunning example from one of the most significant living artists today. One of the most coveted artists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Kusama transcended two of the most cardinal contemporary art movements of Pop Art and Minimalism to become a bona fide pop culture icon. Her persona blurs artist and celebrity, and international exhibitions have solidified her as a contemporary behemoth with global appeal, attracting collectors worldwide. Today, Kusama is one of the few women who consistently rank amongst the highest-selling living artists.

Employing a variety of media throughout her career, Kusama has worked across sculpture, film, fashion, literature, installation, and painting. Her oeuvre is unified by motifs, manifested through obsessive yet deliberate repetition. Kusama's preoccupation with dots began as a child, when she began experiencing hallucinations that often involved fields of spots. She was terrified by the lucid visions of dots in dense patterns, auras, and flashes of bright lights that consumed her surroundings, and herself, to the point of annihilation, or, in her words, "self-obliteration". Seeking solace through art, Kusama drew and painted as therapy. Those early hallucinations and the theme of dots would forever galvanize her work throughout her career.

Dots Obsession is an exceptional example of Kusama's iconic motif. Created in 1997, it directly relates to the examples the artist developed on her arrival New York in the late 1950s. However, this series demonstrates more complexity of composition and shows an artist at the peak of her experimental powers. The delicate overlapping and interweaving of forms seen in the present work illustrates a mature expression of Kusama's original motifs and concept, and manifests her themes of dots into a wholly otherworldly realm. "With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars," the artist mused. Within this glittering complex web of twinkling metallic orbs, Kusama has constructed a golden galaxy. Shimmering resplendent spheres hover and dance against the endless black ground creating a boundless space of jewel-like dots that almost appear to grow and reach organically beyond the limits of the painting. Kusama has created an infinite universe on a finite canvas: the result is hypnotic. The viewer becomes lost in Kusama's spellbinding visual language and the rich depth of the complex, pulsating forms, spellbound by the finality of infiniteness.

The use of gold is particularly rare for Kusama, and no other work from this series has appeared at auction previously with this colorway. The astral atmosphere that the metallic color creates is balanced by Dots Obsession's deep rooted connections to art history. The finely and deliberately placed dots draw comparisons with Byzantine gold mosaics, evoking a holy sense of the divine and the majesty within Kusama's universe. Austrian artist Gistav Klimt was also influenced by the splendor of these spectacular mosaics. Though infinitely abstract, the present work arouse echoes of Klimt's masterpiece Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), with its glimmering gold patterns and central theme of womanly divinity.

Unique provenance augments this works desirability. Never before offered at auction, the present work has remained in the same private collection for almost two decades. Fresh to market, Dots Obsession has institutional provenance, having been exhibited at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2010.

Kusama continues to be an artistic powerhouse, with new shows and retrospectives continuing to cement her importance each year globally. In 2021, Kusama exhibited Cosmic Nature, an outdoor installation series at the New York Botanical Garden, to critical acclaim. In 2022, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., presents the much anticipated One with Eternity which will display the museum's permanent collection of works by Kusama, including two of her Infinity Mirror Rooms. Running through May 2022, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective - an extensive survey of Kusama's career and her first major exhibition in Israel. Today, her works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Tate in London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others.