Yayoi Kusama's Highheel 4 (1999) takes a pair of yellow stilettos and places them against a deep blue field covered in a pink structure of rounded petal-like shapes — the shoes vivid and immediate in yellow, the blue and pink of the surrounding field creating a warm-cool contrast that gives the image a different chromatic energy from the earlier shoe works of the 1980s. The shoes are rendered in yellow with blue dots ranging from small at the upper edge to large circles across the broadest section of each shoe, a diagonal grid pattern across the toe, and a brick-like sequence along the heel, each area treated with its own arrangement of marks whilst remaining part of a unified surface. The lamé woven into the screenprint gives the yellow a slightly metallic sheen, the colour shifting subtly with light in a way that flat ink alone cannot achieve. The result is closer to fashion illustration filtered through decorative pattern than to conventional still life.

The high heel runs as a recurring subject through Kusama's engagement with fashion across several decades. In New York during the late 1960s she staged happenings and performances in which clothing and accessories became extensions of her larger visual vocabulary — polka-dot dresses, painted shoes, bodies absorbed into repeated marks. By the 1980s and 1990s those interests had moved fully into printmaking, with hats and shoes treated not simply as fashion objects but as sculptural forms capable of carrying colour, repetition and surface variation with the same intensity as her pumpkins and flowers.

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