Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul)

Kusama made this painting in the late 1980s, as her international reputation as an artist and author expanded significantly. Kusama was an important member of the downtown New York art scene in the late 1950s and 1960s, but returned to Japan in the early 1970s and voluntarily entered a mental hospital, where she lives to this day. "Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul)" echoes the paintings Kusama made in New York, in which her obsessive repetition of dots and the canvases’ large size generate a sense of profusion and absorption in infinite space. In "Sprouting," Kusama updates that motif by adding tail- or vine-like forms connecting the dots, which seem to pulsate as they cover the painting’s two panels and encroach on the verdant open space at its center. Kusama’s work often contains personal allusions; here, the suggestion of growth may refer to her family’s business of cultivating flowers and wholesaling their seeds.