Yayoi Kusama's Flowers 1 (1985) takes five daisy-like blooms and places them against a deep black ground, the white petals and yellow centres of each flower rendered in dots and the green stems and leaves covered in their own dense pattern, the whole image organised with the clarity of a botanical illustration submitted to Kusama's rigorous vocabulary of repetition. The petals are covered in small pink and red dots on white, the centres in yellow and red, the leaves in green with a secondary pattern of marks running across them, the stems similarly worked — every element described in its own variation of the same system, nothing left unmarked. The flowers are simple in form — each one a ring of rounded white petals around a dotted centre, the stems straight and the leaves arranged in symmetrical pairs along their length.

The five blooms are distributed across the image in a loose row, slightly different in height, the arrangement suggesting a garden border rather than a formal image — plants growing rather than placed. The black ground behind is covered in a white fractured field, the irregular tessellation filling every space between and around the flowers with the same density as the forms in front of it, the background as activated as the still life itself. Kusama began making flower works in New York in the early 1960s, at a moment when the flower was being claimed at once by Pop Art and by the counterculture.

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