Yayoi Kusama
14.0 × 11.0 in
Yayoi Kusama's Flowers (1982) takes a single red tulip-like bloom and places it against a black ground covered in a white net of small irregular shapes — not the dot system of the pumpkin works but the Infinity Net structure applied at a tight, dense scale, the background a continuous field of small interlocking forms that press in around the flower from every side.
The red bloom sits at the top of a green stem, its petals open and slightly ruffled at the edges, the surface covered in small dark dots that describe its volume. Below it, two broad green leaves extend outward on either side, each one covered in the same white net structure as the black ground — so the leaves and the background share the same marking system whilst remaining distinct through colour, the green leaves readable against the black field through tone alone whilst their surfaces carry the same irregular network. A blue border runs around all four edges with white dots placed at regular intervals, the frame completing the treatment of every surface within the image.
The use of the net structure in the background connects this directly to the Infinity Nets paintings Kusama began in New York in 1958 — the same all-over field of small irregular marks covering every available surface, the pattern extended across the black ground with the same evenness and the same refusal of hierarchy that defined those early works. Here it functions as a setting for the flower rather than as the sole subject, the net pressed into the background whilst the bloom in red occupies the foreground — a figure-ground relationship that the pure net works deliberately refuse.
The blue dotted border gives the image a decorative frame that connects it to the Hats and Shoes portfolio works of the same period, suggesting that Flowers (1982) belongs to the same moment in her practice — a concentrated body of works in which everyday and natural subjects are placed within tightly controlled, bordered compositions.
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