Yayoi Kusama's Night Flowers (2003) takes forms that read at once as flowers and marine organisms — tentacled, radial, their arms extending outward in curving lines covered in dots and smaller marks — and distributes them across a deep blue ground that gives the whole image the quality of something seen underwater rather than in a garden. Three large forms dominate the image, each one a central body from which multiple arms extend and curl, the surfaces covered in a green and teal repeated dots that maps every curve and taper. Between and around them, the blue ground is filled with a dense pattern of small rounded marks in deeper blue, the background as activated as the forms in front of it, the distinction between figure and field kept deliberately close.

Smaller forms appear at the edges, the image suggesting a larger population of these creatures extending beyond the image's boundary. The title names them as flowers but the visual reference is wider than that — the forms carry something of the sea anemone, the jellyfish, the deep-sea organism photographed under artificial light. Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, far from any coastline, but her hallucinations from childhood had always involved organic forms multiplying across surfaces, patterns that behaved like living things.

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