Dress
Medium: Lithograph and screenprint on Verin d’Arches paper
Lithograph
[4 plates, 4 colors, 4 runs]
Screenprint
[1 screen, 1 color, 1 run]
Year: 1982
Image: 53 x 45.6 cm (20.9 x 18 inches)
Sheet: 66×56 cm (26×22 inches)
Edition: 70
Artist’s Proofs: 1 AP
Printer: Shimo-oka Yoshiaki
Literature: ABE 8
Yayoi Kusama Prints 1979-2007, ABE PUBLISHING LTD, Number 8, Illustrated page 16
Signed, titled, numbered, and dated in pencil
This 1982 print shifts the logic of portraiture by removing the body altogether. What remains is a dress—suspended, frontal, and eerily autonomous—standing in for the artist herself. Kusama turns clothing into a surrogate self, a strategy that aligns seamlessly with her long-standing interest in absence, repetition, and substitution.
Formally, the composition is rigorously structured. The dress occupies the center of the image, its silhouette clearly defined against a dense black-and-white netted background. The red surface of the garment is filled with organic, cellular motifs, echoing the same visual language found in Kusama’s nets, pumpkins, and flowers. The figure-ground relationship is deliberately unstable: the background presses inward, while the dress asserts itself through color and scale, producing a controlled visual tension.
Color is deployed with precision rather than decoration. The dominant red suggests corporeality and intensity, counterbalanced by the yellow, polka-dotted collar—an unmistakable Kusama signature. Green borders at the top and bottom frame the composition, functioning almost like theatrical curtains, reinforcing the sense of display. The small hanger labeled “KUSAMA” introduces a dry, conceptual note: authorship becomes literal, branded, and slightly ironic.
Conceptually, the work extends Kusama’s notion of self-obliteration. By presenting an empty dress, she implies presence through absence—the artist is everywhere in the pattern, yet nowhere as a physical body. The obsessive repetition that fills the garment mirrors the psychological mechanism that underpins her practice: control through accumulation, identity dissolved into surface.
Within Kusama’s graphic oeuvre of the early 1980s, this print is particularly incisive. It synthesizes fashion, self-portraiture, and mental landscape into a single, immediately legible image. Direct, disciplined, and conceptually sharp, it demonstrates Kusama’s ability to reduce complex ideas of selfhood and repetition into a visual statement that is both playful and profoundly unsettling.
Auction Results
SBI Art Auction: 12 April 2025
Estimated: JPY 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
JPY 2,530,000 / USD 17,595
YAYOI KUSAMA
Dress (Kusama 7), 1982
Lithograph, collage
Signed, titled, dated and numbered
From the edition of 75
SBI Art Auction: 6 July 2024
Estimated: JPY 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
JPY 4,830,000 / USD 30,047
YAYOI KUSAMA
Dress (Kusama 8), 1982
Lithograph, screenprint
Signed, titled, dated and numbered
From the edition of 70
SBI Art Auction: 27 January 2024
Estimated: JPY 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
JPY 3,910,000 / USD 26,385
YAYOI KUSAMA
Dress (Kusama 8), 1982
Lithograph, screenprint
Signed, titled, dated and numbered
From the edition of 70
Seoul Auction: 26 April 2022
Estimated: KRW 45,000,000 – 80,000,000
KRW 45,000,000 (Hammer)
KRW 53,100,000 / USD 42,475
YAYOI KUSAMA
Dress, 1982
Lithograph and screenprint
Signed, dated, titled and numbered on the recto
Edition: 40/70
Mainichi Auction: 30 October 2021
Estimated: JPY 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
JPY 2,900,000 (Hammer)
JPY 3,378,500 / USD 29,645
YAYOI KUSAMA
Dress, 1982
Lithograph
Signed
From the edition of 70