Acrylic on canvas

38 × 45.5 cm. 15 × 17 7/8 in.

Signed in English, titled in Japanese and dated on the reverse
PROVENANCE
25 Feb 2012, SBI Tokyo Spring Auction, Lot 59
Important Private Collection, Asia

This work is accompanied with a registration card issued by Yayoi Kusama studio

In the Flowing Seasons, Living as a Bloom
Yayoi Kusama's Story of Life

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower.
– William Blake, a famous British poet

In Yayoi Kusama's works of the 80's, a powerful flow of the energy of life bursts out with confidence. That stage is recognized as an important milestone of her work. She uses repeated elements to create a natural structure. She uses a literary narrative full of fantasy colors as the starting point. She uses colorful colors to write life stories about the “four seasons”, connecting them into the magical secret words in Alice's Wonderland, giving an unprecedented painting environment – which, later, seizes the opportunity and becomes a legend.

The Crucial Overflight of the Spirit

In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan due to illness, where she lived and worked in a mental hospital for a long time. Away from the hustle and bustle of the New York art scene, the peaceful life of her homeland enabled her to feel and appreciate the pulsation of the natural world more with her heart, and turned it into the nourishment of her creation what she saw from careful observation and subtle understanding. She transformed the endless flow of whimsical ideas in her mind, as well as the bit of observation and understanding of her hometown after 15 years of absence, into words, and started her own literary creation. In 1977, she published a collection of personal poems, and in the following year published the first novel “Manhattan Suicide Repeated Offenders”. From 1983 to 1990, she wrote and published 7 novels, several collections of short stories, and collections of poems.

Although Yayoi Kusama's literary achievements are rarely mentioned when discussing her creations, it is an important source of inspiration for her visual art. Petals in Early Summer was created in 1988 when her literary creation was full of enthusiasm. That year, she published the novel “Between Heaven and Earth”. If one compares it with the picture of Petals in Early Summer, Kusama uses intertwined bright orange thin lines and black dots to give the objective narrative text a subjective image. On the back of the painting, the name of the painting written by the artist has the unique literary expression of this period, highlighting the artist's special feelings for this work.

Praise of life, poem dedicated to the world

“This is my epic. It contains everything about me. The spells and nets of dots envelop me in a magic curtain of mysterious invisible power. Red, green or yellow dots can be of the earth, sun, or stars. Individual dots do not exist. Dots and dots can form a network. After the continuity is created, the wirelessly extending space is also born.”
——Yayoi Kusama

At the same time, the artist further blended the representative “polka dot” elements with the “infinite net” elements, and further brought the creativity of the two to the extreme, and fully demonstrated a leap in his own art: in Petals in Early Summer , Four huge green and ink “polka dot chains” arranged vertically support the entire screen space, and twelve small chains run parallel to it. It resembles the relationship between the twelve months of the four seasons of the year, the boundless time is specifically contained in the work, with the background of the sky-like blue and yellow grid intertwined at the bottom, swaying and composing the graceful rhythm of life. It is reminiscent of Van Gogh's gift for his newborn nephew——Blooming Apricot Flower. Traveling through time, two artistic geniuses, in the leisurely sunny day, have an insight into the hopeful color of life, through the pulse of nature. The longing in the heart injects the strength of forward movement into life together in the picture.

In 2020, as the COVID epidemic continues to spread, the world is as if the pause button has been pressed. At this turbulent time, the 91-year-old Yayoi Kusama published a poem written to the world through the internet, and attached a painting titled When Life Burns Infinitely to the Universe. The orange-red Mount Fuji follows the green earth where everything grows. In the melodious and majestic poems of the blue sky and grass, it shows strong vitality to symbolize the world is full of hope and positive energy, and appeals to the world to unite go over together this difficult time.

And Petals in Early Summer tells us that, as early as 32 years ago, Kusama already used orange lines that also transmitted hope energy to guide the earth linked by green waves, telling the endless seasons of splendor.

Price estimate:
HKD: 1,300,000 - 2,500,000
USD: 167,000 - 321,200

Auction Result:
HKD: 2,040,000