Yayoi Kusama’s Sea in the Evening Glow plunges the viewer into a rhythmic, swirling, undulating mass of forms. Painted in 1995, this work encapsulates the unique aesthetic that has made Kusama such a globally-recognised figure in contemporary art. Here, a near uniform yet clearly organic pattern dominates the entirety of the canvas. Rather than her iconic polka dots, this painting recalls seaweed, algae or amoebas. Kusama has painted it in acrylic, giving the surface a greater flatness but allowing the vibrant tones of the deliberately-limited palette to become all the more vivid. This work recalls the uniformity of Kusama’s famous early works, the Infinity Net paintings of the late 1950s, in which she painted white dots on white, creating vast absorbing canvases. In Sea in the Evening Glow, a similar effect is achieved through the intertwining forms that appear to hover, float and recede on the surface.

Sea in the Evening Glow was painted at a crucial point in Kusama’s career. She had already had a successful career in New York, beginning in the 1950s, before returning to her native Japan for health reasons. There, she worked in relative obscurity for some years. However, in 1988 she was granted a retrospective in Japan, at Fukuoka’s Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, and the following year in the USA at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York. These exhibitions helped to re-establish Kusama on the international scene—a position she has retained, and flourished in, in the intervening two decades. Sea in the Evening Glow was painted in the years after Kusama found herself once again propelled to the vanguard of the art scene.

Kusama has long been a trailblazer and pioneer, be it in her abstract paintings, her mirror-lined environments or her happenings. Her idiosyncratic output is highly personal, rather than being driven by theory or art history. Instead, it is a response to the bewildering and sometimes debilitating hallucinations that have plagued her since childhood. In these, patterns would often superimpose themselves over the visual world. Kusama’s paintings are a form of therapy, exorcising these visions. At the same time, they celebrate the connectedness of all things that such patterns reveal: in paintings such as Sea in the Evening Glow, Kusama is illustrating how we all form part of a grand, interlinked whole. Discussing her hallucinations, Kusama has written in terms that relate to this picture: ‘Dissolution and accumulation; propagation and separation; particulate obliteration and unseen reverberations from the universe - these were to become the foundations of my art.’ (Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. R. McCarthy, London, 2013, p. 69).