Yayoi Kusama

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Throughout the course of her distinguished career, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has developed a practice which, whilst sharing affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop Art, ZERO and Nul, fights to resist any singular categorisation. Kusama's fruit baskets have served as a recurring subject in her works and Fruits, executed in 1996, follows her fundamental concept of Infinity Nets with the multiplex addition of her iconic dots and organic symbols.

The intricate geometric arrangement of the background, fruit basket, and tabletop in the present painting illustrates her logic behind the spatial relationship. Fruits attests to her own artistic enhancement, while epitomising her creative practice since its earliest days.

The basket is set against a turquoise background covered with an infinite net of black-outlined triangles. The delicate fine lines stretch and connect in a seemingly unconscious manner, leaving the viewer in a trance between figurative and abstract representations.

The fruits in the basket are painted in bold colours using visually directional dots arranged in a concentric pattern, reminiscent of her widely identifiable Pumpkins. Kusama's motif of the pumpkin form has achieved an almost mythical status in her art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash growing in the fields that surrounded her childhood home, and the pumpkin continues to occupy a special place in her body of work.