Yayoi Kusama's Green Shoes takes two women's pumps and places them on a black ground covered in a green network of irregular lines — the shoes and the surface behind them built from the same two colours, green and black, the objects distinguishable from their setting through form and mark-making alone. Each shoe is covered in multiple systems at once — dots of varying sizes across the toe and upper, a brick-like rectangular pattern along the sole, diagonal hatching along the instep, a strap across the front rendered in a finer grid. The level of detail is almost architectural, each surface of the shoe treated as a distinct zone with its own vocabulary of marks, the overall effect somewhere between a technical drawing and a decorated object.

The black ground carries a green network of irregular lines across its full extent, the lines forming polygons of varying sizes that cover every corner of the sheet. The shoes sit within this field without being separated from it by any border or shadow — they occupy the same space as the ground, the distinction between figure and setting maintained purely through the density and type of marks applied to each. the print sits within the Hats and Shoes portfolio of 1984, a group of prints in which Kusama applied her pattern to personal accessories — objects associated with femininity, fashion and self-presentation. This connects directly to her New York years, when she designed polka-dot clothing, staged fashion happenings in which participants wore dot-covered garments, and used dress as a vehicle for the same investigation she was conducting in painting and sculpture. The shoe — a charged object in the history of both fashion and art, from Warhol's early shoe illustrations to the feminist discourse of the 1970s — becomes in Kusama's hands simply another surface for the system to inhabit.

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