Yayoi Kusama's Fruits (1984) places a large red bowl at the centre of the image, holding pears, bananas, grapes and two small white acorns, the arrangement spilling upward into the dark field above where small yellow cherry-like forms on long stalks float freely against the black background as though the fruit has escaped the containment of the bowl entirely. The bowl is rendered in red with white dots and a brick-like base in dark red, its interior containing the yellow fruits — each pear and banana covered in a dense dot sequence of black on yellow, the grapes in green at the top of the pile, the acorns in black and white. The fruits that float above the bowl in the dark field — small yellow spheres on thin stalks, some with spiral patterns, some with their own dot sequences — give the image an unexpected quality of dispersal and movement, the still life genre's convention of the contained arrangement pushed past its boundary into something more dynamic.

The dark field is filled with a white structure of irregular leaf-like shapes — the same vocabulary as the 1982 hat and flower works of this period, the black and white field pressing in around the bowl and the floating fruits with equal density. above, a green surface carries its own dark structure of lines, the foreground treated as a distinct zone. Two small white forms sit in the lower right corner, outside the bowl, as though dropped or fallen. The floating fruits place this within a tradition of surrealist still life — the object liberated from its conventional setting, the apple that Magritte suspended in front of a face, the arrangement that refuses to stay arranged. Kusama does not work from Surrealism but from her own psychological experience, and the floating cherry-forms here have the quality of the hallucinations she described from childhood — familiar objects multiplied and set loose across a field, present everywhere and belonging nowhere.

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