Yayoi Kusama's Flowers QE (1993) renders a vase of wildflowers in black and white — the arrangement loose and slightly unruly, stems curving in different directions, blooms at varying stages of opening, one flower fully unfurled at the top, others still in bud, the whole image carrying a quality that sits between celebration and something darker. The vase at the base is covered in large bold circles that scale down toward the rim, the dot sequence here at its most dramatic — the circles at the widest point of the vessel large enough to read as independent forms, the pattern almost overwhelming the object it describes. The stems rise from it in curving white lines, each one surrounded by smaller dots, the leaves rendered in fine hatched marks that differ from mark structure used on the blooms and the vase, every element given its own distinct vocabulary of marks.

The flowers themselves — daisy-like, spidery, some wilting slightly at their tips — are worked in fine dots on white, the petals detailed enough to suggest specific botanical species without quite committing to any of them. The black ground is covered in the fractured white web that fills every corner, pressing in around the arrangement with the same density as the forms in front of it. Against that darkness the white of the vase and flowers reads with an almost luminous quality — the image working like a woodcut or an engraving, the white marks carved out of black rather than drawn onto white. The combination of wildflowers in varying states — some opening, some drooping, some fully open — gives the image a quality that Dutch Golden Age flower paintings understood well: the arrangement as a meditation on different stages of life held within a single moment, beauty and decay present in the same image without either overwhelming the other.

For more information or to buy Flowers QE by Yayoi Kusama, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.