Yayoi Kusama needs no introduction. From her enigmatic style, her art’s incredible monetary value, and the personal traumatic origins of her artwork, both she and her art have made an incredible impact on the industry. Her iconic infinite nets and polka-dot styles have graced many canvases over the years, but at Sotheby’s special auction, a one-of-a-kind Kusama has hit the market.
The work is being offered in Sotheby’s "Sealed" auction format and will be held online between 18 and 27 June. The work itself is in London, having had an illustrious provenance on the continent. The statue titled Phantom Polka Dots of Fate, Ordained by Heaven, Were the Greatest Gift Ever for Me is estimated at between £1.2 and £1.8 million (around US$ 1.5 to 2.3 million).
The statue is one of her newest works, being completed in 2021, and is only comparable in design to works found in museums or displays such as Lodnon’s Tate Modern or the New York Botanical Gardens. This rarity and praise amongst some of the art world’s finest collections elevate the piece's value.
The work’s exclusivity is punctuated by the format it is being offered. The system is all online and invites bidders to bid aggressively on an anonymous leaderboard system. The winning bid is never revealed and the whole system is meant to generate more publicity for sales, there are also no buyers' premiums. This specific lot has no reserve price, and is the first artwork sold on the platform, with it being previously only used for luxury goods.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)⏐Phantom Polka Dots of Fate, Ordained by Heaven, Were the Greatest Gift Ever for Me, stainless steel, aluminum, one-way mirror, acrylic, FRP, paint, sticker, LED, styrofoam, portable batteries controller box
Executed in 2021, this work is unique
210 x 123.3 129.6 cm
Provenance:
- Victoria Miro, London
- Private Collection, Europe
Notes: This work will be accompanied by a registration card issued by YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.
Estimate: £1,200,000 - 1,800,000 (offered without reserve)
Auction House: Sotheby’s, London
Sale: Yayoi Kusama
Date and Time: 18 - 27 June 2024⏐2:00 pm (London local time)
This statue makes use of Kusama’s polka-dot style of art, one of her two ubiquitous styles alongside her infinite nets. The origins of her polka dots come from her somewhat traumatic childhood and mental health issues.
Beginning when she was around 10 years old, Kusama started experiencing hallucinations. This was paired with her abusive mother and womanizing father. Such experiences were only made worse by the war that would break out in her childhood, with her being drafted into the war effort in 1945 as a factory worker. Kusama’s childhood led her to crave more freedom and creativity in her life.
Kusama’s first-ever work featuring polka-dots was a sketch done in 1939 when the artist was around 9 or 10 years old. The sketch features a woman wearing a kimono. The woman believed to be her mother is covered in polka dots.
Yayoi Kusama | Untitled (1939) | 25 x 22 cm | Kusama (second on the right) with her family
The importance of polka dots to Kusama is far from aesthetic, with it being a coping mechanism of sorts for her mental illness. The dots engulfed and embraced her as a person, and from there they engulfed anything and everything around her. Individuals, animals, or items would all become one and lose a sense of self once absorbed by the dots.
As such, these dots “obliterated” Kusama’s anxieties and became a key motif throughout her work, signifying her loss of sense of self. This is all according to her 1967 film Self-Obliteration, with the idea of obliteration itself becoming the pairing theme for the dots motif.
A closeup photo of the polka dots that pepper the design of the Kusama statue that is up for sale
In this work, the polka-dots are displayed across the interior of the statue, with them being most prevalent on these weaving tentacle-like tubes that traverse the interior of the chamber. Each one is illuminated by LED lights on the interior. The sides, not covered with glass, are instead lined with mirrors that reflect the patterns on the lit tubes, creating a sort of limitless feeling with the polka dots.
The confined and geometric chamber makes it appear as if tentacles are floating through space, hovering in the five-sided space. Viewers are invited to look into the box and appreciate how a wide array of patterns and permutations of these dots appear across the space. The use of these various sizes of dots across this neatly built box gives the viewer a sense of everything cascading neatly in the chamber.
This statue is very much a miniaturized idea of her “mirror room” concept, in which she makes use of large mirror angles against each other to repeatedly reflect her dots or nets, creating a true sense of infinity with her patterns. Kusama exploits this quality that mirrors have to create the illusion of infinite space filled with her patterns and has thusly miniaturized it into this statue.
Regarding these mirror rooms, the previous owner of this work, Victoria Miro, had a much larger version of a work similar to this statue made into a room once. Miro is one of Britain’s most famous art dealers and gallery owners. In 2016, as part of a series of works done as part of Miro’s gallery, Kusama created All the Eternal Lovie I Have for the Pumpkins, a work that featured a large infinite room with large illuminated pumpkins with a polka-dot pattern.
This work bears many similarities to the statue being offered by Sotheby’s in terms of color, design, theme, and motif. Even the pumpkins in this state feel as if they are slowly swirling and moving under the conditions of the light, not unlike the tentacles.
Yayoi Kusama⏐ All the Eternal Lovie I Have for the Pumpkins (2016)
The other work of a comparable nature would be Kusama’s Pumpkin’s Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity. This piece is featured at the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku, Tokyo which opened in 2014. The museum piece is a box of similar design to the one being sold by Sotheby’s and features many small pumpkins next to each other, illuminating the glass space.
The work also makes use of the reflection technique to constantly reflect the glowing pumpkins and is the sole exhibit on its floor, highlighting the importance and uniqueness of these statues that Kusama has made.
Yayoi Kusama ⏐Pumpkin’s Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity ⏐Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo
Whilst we can draw parallels both artistically and financially between this piece and past Kusama works, it is hard to highlight how rare this one specific piece is, across Kusama’s catalog of work. Even among fellow “mirror rooms” the shape of the tentacles is a wholly unique design element. It being sold in Sotheby’s “Sealed” format is only an additional attestation to the importance of this wonderfully crafted piece of artwork.