Yayoi Kusama's Flowers (1985) takes a group of narcissus-like blooms rising from long green stems against a deep black ground covered in a red network of irregular lines — the flowers white with red dot markings and yellow centres, the stems in deep green with white dots running along their length, the whole image reading like a night garden seen under artificial light. The flowers cluster in two loose groups, their stems curving slightly as they rise, the arrangement suggesting plants growing in a bed rather than cut and placed in a vase. Each bloom is rendered with botanical precision — multiple small petals around a yellow centre, the petals covered in red dots that follow their surface, the centres in yellow with their own dot sequence.

The stems are long and narrow, covered in white dots spaced evenly along their length, the leaves blade-like and similarly marked, the whole lower section of the image a dense green mass of dotted stems pressing upward from the base. The black ground is covered in a red network of irregular lines — a warm, low-contrast combination that gives the darkness a different quality from the black-and-white or black-and-yellow grounds of other works in her output, the red lines visible but not insistent, the black dominant and the flowers reading against it with the luminosity of something lit from within. Narcissus had particular resonance in Kusama's practice.

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