Yayoi Kusama - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, May 26, 2018 | Phillips

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design...

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018

  • Provenance

    Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
    Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    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).

  • Artist Biography

    Yayoi Kusama

    Japanese

    Named "the world's most popular artist" in 2015, it's not hard to see why Yayoi Kusama continues to dazzle contemporary art audiences globally. From her signature polka dots—"fabulous," she calls them—to her mirror-and-light Infinity Rooms, Kusama's multi-dimensional practice of making art elevates the experience of immersion. To neatly pin an artistic movement onto Kusama would be for naught: She melds and transcends the aesthetics and theories of many late twentieth century movements, including Pop Art and Minimalism, without ever taking a singular path.

     

    As an nonagenarian who still lives in Tokyo and steadfastly paints in her studio every day, Kusama honed her punchy cosmic style in New York City in the 1960s. During this period, she staged avant-garde happenings, which eventually thrust her onto the international stage with a series of groundbreaking exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s and the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. She continues to churn out paintings and installations at inspiring speed, exhibiting internationally in nearly every corner of the globe, and maintains a commanding presence on the primary market and at auction.

     
    View More Works

Property of an Important Australian Collector

4

Yayoi Kusama

Sea in the Evening Glow

1995
signed, titled and dated '1995 Yayoi Kusama "Sea in the Evening Glow [in Kanji]"' on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
130.4 x 97.6 cm. (51 3/8 x 38 3/8 in.)
Painted in 1995, this work is accompanied by a registration card issued by the Yayoi Kusama studio.

Estimate
HK$2,400,000 - 3,500,000 
€258,000-377,000
$308,000-449,000

Sold for HK$5,140,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

Sandy Ma
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2025

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018