Acrylic on mixed media sculpture

55×20.2×19.7 cm. 21 5/8×8×7 3/4 in.

Signed in English, dated, and titled in English on the underside of each part
PROVENANCE
MOMA Contemporary, Fukuoka
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

This work is accompanied by a registration card issued by YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.

Enshrining the Goddess!
Yayoi Kusama's Dreamlike Eternal of Love and Beauty

"I firmly believe that the ideas behind artistic creation are born the solitude of contemplation, and it is in the serene silence of solace that it radiates with a spectrum of vibrant colours."
——Yayoi Kusama

In 1996, Yayoi Kusama mounted a solo exhibition at the renowned Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, reigniting the art world's and art market's attention upon her. The International Association of Art Critics named it the "Best Exhibition of the Year," and The New York Times declared it as having "finally cemented the artist's historical standing." With major retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1998 - Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 - showcasing her seminal contributions to contemporary art, the near-septuagenarian Kusama gained widespread recognition from the international art establishment in the late 1990s. Renewed in creative vigour, she embarked on her distinctive Venus series in 1997. The work presented in the auction, Self Obliteration (Venus), completed in 1998, recasts the ideal notion of beauty in Western art within a quasi-open sculptural space. Covering with Kusama's signature polka dots and infinite netting, the work is imbued with fresh interpretations of freedom, beauty, and feminine self-actualization.

The Sole Divinity, Rewriting the Western Canon

Revered as the "perfect goddess," the Louvre's treasure Venus de Milo, exemplifies the classical ideal - its proportions adhering to the golden ratio of 1:1.618, its eight-headed figure universally heralded as the apotheosis of idealized feminine beauty. As the Greek goddess Aphrodite, Venus symbolizes "love, beauty, fertility, and prosperity." Countless artists throughout history have taken her as their muse. Here, Kusama envelops this very emblem of Western artistic authority with her signature polka dots and infinite netting, constructing a colossal energetic tension within her meticulous brushwork that redefines the parameters of "ideal beauty." The original classical sculpture's pale marble tones give way to vivid, vibrant orange and a profound, cosmic black - the interplay of these radically contrasting hues conjuring an alluring, hallucinatory vision that draws the viewer into Kusama's kaleidoscopic realm.

The Essence of Individual Existence: MY Era Defined by ME

Remarkably, the Venus series represents the sole instance in which Kusama has taken a "deity" as the primary subject of her sculptural work. This fact underscores her aspirations toward "rich love and ideal beauty," as well as a pronounced impulse of self-identification. While the sculptural details of Venus' form appear to gradually dissipate within the polka dot matrix, her outline remarkably grows ever more distinct. It is as if the individual, while diminishing to the point of near-dissolution within the cosmic expanse, simultaneously emerges as a vaster, more autonomous, infinite being.

Towering between Heaven and Earth: Self-Contained Landscape of Solitude

Kusama's Venus series can be divided into two categories: one featuring a standard-sized, two-metre Venus sculpture positioned in front of an Infinity Net painting, creating a perpetual dialogue between sculpture and canvas; the other comprising smaller tabletop Venus sculptures encased within boxes or half-enclosed spaces, recalling Kusama's childhood visions of "infinity covering the ceiling and floor." The latter are exceedingly rare, with fewer than 10 examples believed to exist, some of which are not full-body sculptures. The work presented in this auction is one such complete figural sculpture, directly acquired by an important private Asian collector from Fukuoka's Gallery of Modern Art in Japan, affirming its exceptional provenance.

The work is meticulously constructed within a box-like wooden frame, akin to the architecture of an ancient Greek temple, allowing Venus to be perceived within a heightened sense of dimensional imagination and spatial dynamism. Influenced by her lifelong love, the box-assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, Kusama has opted for a semi-open form that leaves the background blank, granting the sculptural subject greater autonomy. Thus, Self Obliteration (Venus) is able to manifest diverse visual effects depending on its environmental context, even when it remains cocooned by the infinite netting. This not only shatters the insularity and dependency of the fully enclosed box format, but also transcends Kusama's own illusory "all-encompassing" hallucinations, elevating the concept of "self-obliteration" to new philosophical heights.

Dissolving the Self: Eternal Beauty from the Female Perspective

Through this work, Kusama proclaims her own "fusion with the eternal." In doing so, she not only transgresses the boundaries between classicism and modernity, but as a contemporary female artist, redefines the very notion of "beauty," exploring the shifting status of women within art historical narratives. Her polka dot overlays can be viewed as a reinterpretation of the "male gaze" that has traditionally objectified the female nude, imbuing the feminine form with new layers of meaning and establishing it as a novel, eternal archetype!

Price estimate:
HKD 2,500,000 - 3,500,000
USD 320,500 - 448,700