Beschreibung:

Yayoi Kusama Fear of Death 2008 acrylic on canvas 76 1/2 x 76 1/2 in. (194.3 x 194.3 cm) Signed, titled and dated "Yayoi Kusama 2008 Fear of Death" on the reverse.
Provenance David Zwirner, New York Private Collection, South America Exhibited New York, Gagosian Gallery, Yayoi Kusama April 16 - June 27, 2009 Literature Yayoi Kusama exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2009, n.p. (illustrated) Catalogue Essay "Every day I am creating a new world by making artworks. I wake up early in the morning and stay up late at night, sometimes until 3am, just to make art. I am fighting for my life and don’t take any rest." Yayoi Kusama 2014 Throughout Yayoi Kusama’s prolific career, she has dedicated herself to artistic innovation and the re-invention of her style. Undoubtedly influenced by – and influential in – the New York art scene of the 60s, Kusama’s oeuvre is wholly unique. Rather than pulling from pre-existing artistic forms, Kusama’s work is a manifestation of the artist’s persistent hallucinations that began to color her world when she was just a child. The two most frequently utilized motifs of Kusama’s career – the net-like design that colonized her earliest canvases, and the polka dots that pattern both room-sized environments and, often, the artist’s body – are said to replicate the forms that monopolize her own sight. Celebrated for these repetitive patterns, her artistic output encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. Ranging from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to her Accumulation sculptures and environments, to her Infinity Net paintings with their dense and continuously arcing patterns, her life’s work is truly remarkable. Much of her oeuvre has been marked with an obsession for and a desire to explore and escape from psychological traumas. Her installations immerse the viewer in her fixated vision of infinity through dots, nets, mirrored spaces or, as here, eyes that illustrate her psychological experiences, sharing her vision with that of the viewer. Fear of Death from 2008 is a masterful exemplar of Kusama’s continued investigation of the compulsive nature of her being and the quasi-psychedelic manner in which she is able to publicly relate her experiences through painting. The canvas takes the shape of a perfect square, typically thought of as one of – if not the most – stable of shapes, with its equilateral sides and perfect 90o angles. However, Kusama instantly destabilizes the uniformity of the canvas by ringing it with a jagged border of blue; each triangular form serves to disrupt the linear continuity transforming the plumb-bob straight sides of the canvas into ones of topographical irregularity. Pointing in towards the yellow ground, the blue peaks assume an antagonistic and violent dimension. Like the cavernous yaw of a beast’s mouth preparing to gnash down upon its prey, the blue border seems determined to simultaneously contain and destroy the picture plane. Yet, even as the jaws of death threaten ominously, the glorious light of the yellow ground explodes back in defiance. Painted in a brilliant sunflower hue, the yellow ground plays host to hundreds of red eyes peering out to the viewer. Assuming both a protective quality and one of ominous paranoia, the ocular repetition clearly manifests Kusama’s obsessive modus operandi. Kusama traces the roots of her unique repetitive style back to her traumatic childhood when she began to experience a specific series of hallucinations. As Kusama recalled, “when I was a child, one day I was walking 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. It was then I learned the idea of self-obliteration. I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas. It was hallucination only the mentally ill can experience.” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama Now, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1998, p. 15) In Fear of Death Kus