The Woman

In the 1950s, Yayoi Kusama began to distance herself from the traditional Japanese watercolor techniques that she learned as a girl and explore abstraction via biomorphic forms. In The Woman, Kusama depicts an amoeba-like organism floating in an endless black abyss. Its title encourages us to read the form as an abstract rendering of female genitalia, with its spikes suggesting anxiety or other fraught psychological conditions around sex, themes Kusama would explore further ten years later, covering a chair in a multitude of phallic forms. The work’s dots and seemingly infinite background also prefigure later works such as Kusama’s abstract Infinity Net paintings and Infinity Mirror rooms, which explore the feeling of smallness generated by vast expanses of space.