SUMMER-STARS QPTW, 2007, is a rarely seen, brightly coloured, large spotted canvas, in which key themes of Kusama’s art – infinity and dispersal – remain central but bright, contrasting colours dominate. Writing about this body of work, Jo Applin comments: ‘The abstract invocation of space and depth within these works is not generated by an artist’s usual means, the use of shading, perspective and scale… Rather, Kusama’s paintings insist on the flat uniformity of the painting surface. The unspecified ground upon which the dots appear to float is undefined and solid… with space flattened out and made plastic, with the stars figuring as fantastical spheres… perfect bubbles and dots floating before the eyes… Infinity and the sense of endlessness, which Kusama so consistently strives to capture in her painting, registers in these works as a tension between reality and fiction, concept and form, situated between the intangible and endless and the material and fixed.’

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, Yayoi Kusama lives and works in Tokyo. Over the past decade there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in North America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours bestowed by the Imperial Family. Kusama is the first woman to be honoured with the prestigious medal for drawings and sculptures. In 2021, the New York Botanical Garden will host an exhibition inspired by Kusama’s lifelong engagement with nature and fascination with the natural world. Among additional major exhibitions in 2021 is Kusama’s first large-scale retrospective in Germany, which takes place at the Gropius Bau in Berlin.