Provenance
Collection of the Artist, New York
Collection of Dr Teruo Hirose, New York (acquired directly from the artist circa 1965)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Auction History
Bonhams New-York: 12 May 2021
Estimated: USD 2,500,000 – 3,500,000
USD 4,590,312

Bonhams : YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929) Untitled 1965

Untitled, executed in the mid-1960s, shows Kusama exploring a brighter, braver palette, foreshadowing the dizzying displays of color and light that define much of her current work. It also shows the various influences and friendships within the artistic community that she would forge upon moving to New York and entering the international artistic fray for the first time in her career. The present work reflects the increased interaction she experienced with many of her European contemporaries throughout the 1960s. Kusama’s work made its European debut in the Monochrome Malerei exhibition at the Städtisches Museum, Leverkusen, West Germany, in 1960. Whilst she did not travel to Europe for that exhibition, it did introduce her to many of the most influential artists of the period including: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and many others. In 1965 she would travel to Europe for various exhibitions including at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where she would interact with artists from the ZERO and Nul groups as well as fellow Japanese émigrés from the Gutai group.

The mutual influence between Kusama and these many European artists and groups cannot be understated. These artists were exploring concepts that Kusama had also been developing in her own practice and which define much of her oeuvre. Ideas of the void and infinity (often one and the same), accumulations and artistic happenings; these new conceptual underpinnings were becoming pivotal ideas across the Atlantic. Kusama was one of the driving forces of this newfound creative energy, and it is during this time that Uecker begins to pound nails into canvases, radiating out from the center of the canvas, just as Kusama’s tiny nets do in the present work. These artists also worked beyond the canvas, with Uecker covering chairs with nails, just as Kusama did with her accumulations onto chairs, beds and boats.

Unusually, the center of the canvas in the present work is devoid of nets, leaving a hazy wash of yellow. This makes Untitled reminiscent of the Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concepts) works that Lucio Fontana, one of the leading artistic voices in Europe, developed after World War II. Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale would see him slashing and gouging his canvases to reach a fresh, new starting point in artistic creation. His series Concetto Spaziale, La fine di Dio, including the example from 1963, now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, was the final stage of this concept. In Fontana’s La Fine di Dio, the violent punctures radiate from the center of the egg-shaped canvas, creating a galaxy of clusters and holes, falling away into the largest of these voids. In Kusama’s painting, this same delicate webbing of organic threads migrates rhythmically towards its vacant center. The effect is a vivid composition of unsettling depth that combines the intricacy of Kusama’s virtuoso hand with her deft ability to produce psychic landscapes that connect deeply with the spectator.