Beschreibung:

Property of an Important Australian Collector Yayoi Kusama Follow 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.
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). Read More Catalogue Essay 草間彌生的畫作《夕映元之海》帶觀者猛然進入一個節奏強勁、旋轉起伏的碩大形體。草間彌生獨樹一幟的美學觀；令她在當代藝壇蜚聲國際，此幅1995年的作品便凝聚了這獨特美學。畫面主導的圖案看起來統一有序，但亦顯然是自然隨性形成的。沒有她最具標誌性的波點圖案，此畫更像是海藻、水藻甚至是阿米巴變形蟲。草間彌生以壓克力作畫，不僅讓表面更為扁平，同時使刻意限制的鮮艷色調更加生動鮮明。此作的統一規律感令人想起藝術家1950年代末的著名早期系列作品《無限網》，該系列作品以白點施於白色之上，營造出大片如吸納吞併的畫幅。《夕映元之海》中交織的造形亦似乎在盤旋、漂浮，隨畫面遠去。 《夕映元之海》是草間彌生藝術生涯重要時刻的作品。1950年代初，她在紐約已頗有成就，然因健康問題而回到日本，起初數年創作很是晦澀。直到1988年她在日本福岡縣北九州市立美術館舉辦了一場回顧展，翌年在紐約國際當代藝術中心亦舉辦回顧展。這些重要展覽讓草間彌生重返國際藝壇焦點，並在接下來的二十多年一直保持不斷。《夕映元之海》便是她再次站到藝壇前衛尖端後數年的作品。 草間彌生向來是一位探索先驅，從她的抽象畫作、環境的反射和自身遭遇都可見一斑。其獨有的創作是極為個人的，並非理論或藝術史學所驅使，而是來自她從兒時開始就籠罩困擾她的幻覺，圖案在她眼裡的斑斕世界總是層疊重複。草間彌生的繪畫猶如一種療愈過程，驅除這種幻象，同時也強調在幻象中一切事物密切相連的關係。在《夕映元之海》等畫作中，草間彌生描繪出每個微小個體連成的巨大整體，環環相扣。她談到自己的幻覺時曾寫道：「解散與聚積；傳播與分離；顆粒毀滅以及宇宙從未所見的迴響 – 這些都是形成我的藝術的基石。」（草間彌生，《無限網：草間彌生自傳》,R. McCarthy 譯，倫敦，2013年，69頁） Read More Artist Bio Yayoi Kusama Japanese • 1929 Follow 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 m