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Yayoi Kusama / Japan b.1929 / Flowers that bloom at midnight 2011 / Fibreglass-reinforced plastic, urethane paint, metal frame / 181 x 181 x 268cm / Purchased 2012 with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. / Photograph: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA
Yayoi KusamaFlowers that bloom at midnight 2011
Not Currently on Display
Flowers that bloom at midnight is drawn from a series of 18 such sculptures in a variety of sizes, poses and colour schemes on which Yayoi Kusama has worked since 2009. Its shiny surface, polka-dotted petals and great, staring eye recalls the animated alien flora of science-fiction and fantasy, while its larger-than-life scale, sleek flowing lines and vibrant colour combinations encourage appreciation from multiple angles. Indeed, each line of vision has been thoroughly checked by the artist, whose process involved modelling the flower in miniature in order to examine each possible line of vision before the full-scale version could be commissioned.
Flowers have long been an important part of Kusama’s oeuvre. Their symbolism reflects many of the artist’s conceptual preoccupations as well as her disregard for dichotomies — they connote life and death, celebration and mourning, masculinity and femininity — while their complex forms, organic, fragile, finding uniqueness through repetition, find echoes across Kusama’s practice. In plentiful supply thanks to her family’s nursery business, flowers flourished in Kusama’s first reported visions, consuming entire rooms and communicating ominously.
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant artists to emerge from Asia in the postwar period. Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Japan in 1929 and was the youngest of four children. By 1941, as a twelve-year-old child, she had begun to notate and paint hallucinations, which she experienced as veils of dots.
During the early 1950s, Kusama recognised that the visual and aural hallucinations she had experienced for a decade were symptomatic of a condition known as ‘rijin’sho’ (depersonalisation syndrome). Kusama continues to experience these hallucinations to this day.
As an adult Kusama developed a vibrant visual iconography composed of dots, often transposed as nets or auras, that has become the familiar visual vocabulary dominating her artistic practice. Kusama moved to New York in 1955, where she lived and worked until 1972, before returning to Japan. Kusama’s practice embraces drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, performance, fashion, tabloid publishing, filmmaking, installation, novels, poetry and music.