Flowers (1984) by Yayoi Kusama takes the most traditional of Western still life subjects — flowers in a vessel — and rebuilds it through her own unique style, every element covered in a different system of marks until the arrangement becomes something other than a still life. The yellow jug sits at the centre, its volume described entirely through dense black dots that graduate from tight clusters at the narrower sections to larger marks across the body — no shading, no cast shadow, just dotted surface tracing the form. Green stems rise from it in loose vertical lines, each one patterned, supporting red blossoms that are similarly flattened and schematic.

The flowers are almost diagrammatic — simple enough to remain legible whilst being too systematised to read as natural. The black ground behind is filled with a white angular network extending across every corner, pressing in against the central forms with equal density. above, a red base is broken into mosaic-like fragments, completing an image in which there is no empty space, no rest — every area treated with the same obsessive attention regardless of whether it is figure or ground. Kusama began making flower works in the early 1960s, a period when she was living in New York and the imagery of flowers was being appropriated across Pop Art and the counterculture at once.

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