"With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the infinitude of the universe."
Yayoi Kusama
Painted in 1990, Nebula is a stunning painting that features Yayoi Kusama’s distinctive cosmic dot motif, central to the artist’s impressive oeuvre. In the late 1980s, Kusama decided to only present her new works in solo shows every few years, focusing her energies on creating series of paintings in the studio before unveiling them to the public. As such, this period in the artist’s career marks Kusama’s return to painting in a large scale similar to the extensive Infinity Net paintings from the late 1950s. Nebula is an elegant example of Kusama’s repetitive polka dots, featuring varying perfect white celestial circles, set against a semi-translucent sea of soft blue-gray acrylic. In contrast to the early New York paintings, built up with thick impasto, her paintings from the end of the 20th century are characterized by a more tightly refined aesthetic, achieved after her return to Japan in the 1970s. Meticulously painted in a combination of thinly applied washes of gray and opaque circles of white exactingly rendered within clearly defined borders, Nebula evokes a geometric balance that is strikingly soothing, and at once dizzying and grounding.
Yayoi Kusama’s fascination with the cosmic is evident throughout the entirety of her oeuvre. In fact, the artist declared that the origins of her polka dots are tied to her interest in the universe, inspired by the infinite possibilities of celestial bodies. As Kusama recalled, “When I was a child, one day I was walking in the field, then all of a sudden, the sky became bright over the mountains, and I saw clearly the very image I was about to paint appear in the sky. I also saw violets, which I was painting, multiply to cover the doors, windows and even my body….I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas” (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in “Damien Hirst Questions Yayoi Kusama, Across the Water, May, 1998” in Kusama: Now, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1998, p. 15).
Later in her career, Kusama’s specific interest in repetition became a means of coping with her psychosomatic anxiety, achieved through a painstaking artistic process that combats the traumas of her psychological abyss. These intensely personal undertones differentiate her Minimalist aesthetic from the works of Western artists. As Alexandra Munroe points out, “Kusama’s paintings differ from Zero and Nul … in many of the same ways it differed from American Minimalism … Kusama’s repetition was never mechanistic or deductive, but the product of obsessional, compulsive performance.” (Alexandra Munroe, “Radical Will: Yayoi Kusama and the International Avant Garde – Kusama’s Paintings and Sculpture in the 1960s” in Yayoi Kusama: Between Heaven and Earth, exh. cat., Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, 1991) As such, Kusama occupies a uniquely personal position in the canon of art history with paintings that are as much as testament to her talent as a painter as they are to her inner demons.