Yayoi Kusama's Fruits (1997) places a blue basket at the centre of the image, holding a pumpkin, a cucumber, mushrooms, a fig, strawberries and corn — every object covered in its own distinct pattern, the whole arrangement set against a black ground covered in a yellow network with white dots floating across it like snow. The blue basket itself is rendered in a brick-like rectangular pattern, its rim decorated with white dots. Inside it the pumpkin sits in dark olive green covered in black dots, the cucumber in bright green with white dots running along its length, the mushrooms in red and blue with their own dot sequences, the fig in deep red, the corn in yellow and blue.

Each object has been given a different colour and a different arrangement of marks — the still life functioning as a catalogue of the ways mark structure can adapt to different forms and volumes, every surface treated with the same attention regardless of its size or significance within the image. The black ground carries a yellow irregular network across its full extent, white dots scattered across it at varying intervals — the background as densely worked as the objects in front of it, the image leaving no area at rest. above, a red surface carries its own pattern of white irregular lines, the table or cloth on which the basket sits given the same treatment as everything else. The tradition of the fruit bowl still life runs from Chardin through Cézanne to Matisse — each artist using the arrangement of domestic objects as a vehicle for formal investigation. Kusama places herself within that lineage whilst transforming its terms entirely: where Cézanne used the apple to investigate volume and plane, Kusama uses the pumpkin, the cucumber and the mushroom to investigate dotted surface's capacity to inhabit any form it encounters.

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