Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama posters: the dot as a method

Two systems run through this work. The nets are fine, endless and hand-painted — the Infinity Nets that made her name in New York. The dots are larger, harder and printed flat, and they build the subject rather than erase it.

Put next to each other, the two do opposite jobs: the net dissolves the background, the dot constructs the pumpkin, the flower, the butterfly.

What is in this collection

• Pumpkins — the yellow squash covered in black dots, her most quoted image.
• Infinity Nets — the early paintings, reproduced at wall size.
• Butterflies and flowers — the dot applied to a shape you recognise.
• Infinity Dots — the field without a subject in it.
• Exhibition posters from the museum shows.

Why yellow and black

The pumpkins are yellow with black dots because that combination refuses to sit still: the yellow advances, the dots break it up, and the object seems to vibrate slightly at the edges. It is the same trick she uses in the red-and-white works, with a different temperature.

Printed flat at poster size, that vibration is what stops a picture of a vegetable from becoming a joke on the wall.

One print or a group

One is usually enough: the repeat is strong and two prints of dots next to each other can start to cancel out. If you want more than one, pair a single object — a pumpkin — with a field, and hang them at different heights so they do not read as a diptych.

The colours are loud. A white or grey wall, a thin black frame, and nothing patterned nearby.

For the Japanese context she belongs to, see Japanese; for pattern in another key, floral.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave within 24 hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, in a tracked tube.