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Start Your JournalAirship to the Cosmos (1987) and some other
by Yayoi Kusama
Personal Reflection
Seeing these together changed the way I think about Kusama’s dots. We’re so used to seeing them as her signature that they can almost become branding: Kusama = dots. But standing close to these paintings, they don’t really feel like dots at all. They feel alive. Some resemble cells dividing. Others look like insects, eyes, larvae, seeds or little organisms swimming around. Then you step back and the individual creatures disappear into a larger rhythm. It made me think that repetition in Kusama isn’t just about repeating an image. It’s about what happens when the individual gets absorbed into something much bigger. My favourite thing was getting very close and then moving several steps backwards. Up close, you notice all the tiny imperfections: the circles aren’t mechanically perfect, lines wobble, shapes mutate. From further away, all that individual labour turns into something almost biological.
About This Artwork
These paintings belong to a particularly vibrant period of Yayoi Kusama’s practice around the 1980s and early 1990s. The wall label identifies six works displayed together: Airship to the Cosmos (1987), Season of New Greenery (1990), Nest of Insects (1988), Untitled (1980), Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization (1987), and Necklace of the Sun (1987), all acrylic on canvas. During the late 1980s, Kusama returned intensely to painting alongside her sculpture and writing. Instead of the restrained monochrome surfaces of her earlier Infinity Nets, these paintings explode with saturated colour: yellow, turquoise, red, pink, green and blue. Yet the underlying idea is surprisingly similar. Small forms are repeated until they become an all-over pattern, and because many are cut off by the edges of the canvas, they seem capable of continuing indefinitely beyond the painting. Looking closely, the patterns aren’t simply decorative dots. They suggest cells, insects, eyes, seeds, microorganisms, flowers, planets and strange little creatures. In Airship to the Cosmos, for example, Kusama’s yellow forms can read simultaneously as spacecraft, birds, insects or extraterrestrial beings floating among clouds of coloured dots. The museum interpretation explicitly connects this repetition to the visual logic of her earlier Infinity Nets. There is also something important happening with scale. A tiny biological form becomes enormous; an individual dot becomes part of a population; one organism becomes hundreds. Kusama repeatedly moves between the microscopic and the cosmic. You can never quite tell whether you’re looking through a microscope or out into space.
- Artist
- Yayoi Kusama
- Location
- Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
- Date experienced
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