Yayoi Kusama's Shoes (1985) places a pair of red high-heeled court shoes against a deep black field covered in a dense yellow structure of small irregular leaf-like shapes — the shoes vivid and immediate against the surrounding darkness, each one rendered in red with white dots of varying sizes scattered across the upper and toe, a green and white bow across the front of each shoe providing the only note of cool colour in an otherwise warm palette. The shoes are positioned at slightly different angles, one turned more toward the viewer than the other, the image suggesting the casual placement of shoes set down at the end of a day rather than a formal arrangement. The red is a warm, saturated tone that inevitably recalls the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz — one of the most recognisable objects in twentieth-century popular culture.

The ruby slipper carries associations of fantasy, transformation and the desire to return home, an everyday object elevated into something mythic through colour and repetition. Kusama's shoes hold some of that charge without becoming illustrative or nostalgic. The repeated dots push the shoes further away from ordinary fashion imagery, turning them into surfaces activated through pattern and accumulation. The white marks move from smaller dots across the body of each shoe to larger circles toward the toe, describing the curves of the leather and heel with the same careful attention Kusama brought to pumpkins, flowers and domestic objects throughout the 1980s.

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