F lamboyant, uncannily anthropomorphic and exuberantly bizarre, Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers that Speak all about my heart given to the sky from 2018 manifests an instantly arresting and compelling presence. Extending to three-metres tall, the monstrous flower comes to life through its towering proportions, bright, riotous colours and curvaceous bodily form. Positioned in an erect disposition reminiscent of a standing figure, the sculpture confronts the viewer with an idiosyncratic Surreal-Pop aura that is at once whimsical and sinister, quirky and playful. Meticulously painted atop a bronze frame, the sculpture exhibits the singular vision that drives Kusama's legendary career. The present work belongs to a series which debuted at Victoria Miro, London, in 2018 evolved from an original series of seven flower sculptures, titled Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, which were displayed at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia in 2011 and subsequently at the Tuilleries gardens in Paris by the Louvre, which coincided with her first French retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2012.

Trifid-like in their psychedelic intensity, the futuristic Flowers is an extraordinary celebration of the artist’s evolution: vibrant colour and iconic polka-dot patterns create fluid forms that appear as if in bloom. Connating life, death, celebration and mourning, flowers have long preoccupied the artist, their complex fragility and unique sense of repetition finding symbolic resonance throughout her oeuvre. Alluding to Kusama’s upbringing on her family’s plant nursery in Matsumoto, flowers figure in many of Kusama’s earliest paintings and drawings. In a photograph of the artist at the age of ten, she is almost obscured by enormous chrysanthemums. Remaining a staple motif in the years that followed Kusama’s departure from Japan, the flower, like the polka-dots, appeared in her ‘happenings’ of the late 1960s, fitting neatly into the context of the ‘flower power’ movement of the t.mes . 

Kusama first engaged in the medium of sculpture in the late 1960s and defined herself as more of a sculptor than painter or colorist (Damien Hirst, ‘Across the Water’ in Exh. Cat., New York, Damien Hirst and Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama: Now, Robert Miller Gallery, 1998, pp. 134-140). Large-scale sculptures such as the present work have long been an important part of Kusama’s total artistic output and she has completed several major outdoor commissions which contend with the likes of Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy. Kusama first made large-scale floral sculptures in 2000 for Kirishima Open-air Museum in Yusui, Japan, followed by permanent commissions including The Visionary Flowers (2002) for Matsumoto City Museum of Art in Nagano, Japan; Tulipes de Shangri-La (2003) for Eurolille in Lille, France; and The Hymn of Life: Tulips (2007) for the city of Beverly Hills, United States. Executed in 2018, the present lot is exemplary of Kusama’s large-scale flower sculptures and displays her refined sculptural prowess: cast in bronze before being painted in Kusama’s characteristically exuberant use of colour, the sculpture’s luminous surface creates a disorienting hypnotic effect, mirroring the artist’s idiosyncratic inner visions that drive her oeuvre.

With its vast scale and masterful physicality, Flowers that Speak all about my heart given to the sky compels the viewer to participate and engage with it by walking around all of its protrusions. Twisting and stretching its leaves vertically and outwardly, the flower seems animated, eager to rise up and come alive. Its form is distinctively anthropomorphic, with leaves resembling limbs, the stem resembling a neck, and the blossom the head; while the capitulum of the flower is replaced by a single large eye. Sentient, whimsically child-like yet also faintly ominous, Flowers consummately encapsulates the duelling dichotomies often found in Kusama’s complex, multifarious yet universally resonant and critically acclaimed oeuvre

草 間彌生在2018年創作的大型雕塑《獻給天空訴述我心聲的花朵》色彩豔麗，狀似人形，異想天開，吸引觀者駐足凝視。花兒雕塑高達三米，高度驚人，色彩繽紛鮮明，曲線玲瓏，栩栩如生。本作聳立的形態讓人聯想起直立人像，向觀者呈現一種與眾不同的超現實普普風格，既荒誕又邪惡，別具趣怪玩味。草間在本作的銅底架上細心著色，彰顯了靈活細膩的筆法，展示促成其傳奇生涯的幻覺意境。本作出自2018年倫敦維多利亞米羅畫廊首度展出的雕塑系列，該系列原先為只有七件花卉雕塑的獨創系列，題為《午夜盛放的花朵》，2011年於澳洲昆士蘭現代藝術館展出，隨後在毗鄰巴黎羅浮宮的杜樂麗花園展出，其時適逢2012年龐畢度中心為草間舉辦在法國的首個回顧展。

《花朵》富有未來主義色彩，迸發出強烈的精神力量，充分展示草間在運用其視覺語彙上的演變︰鮮豔用色和標誌圓點加強了雕塑的流動感，花朵彷彿在妖嬈盛放。花朵象徵生命、死亡、慶典和哀悼，一直在草間的創作中佔有重要位置，花朵本身的脆弱和重複的特質，也與草間作品中的象徵意義產生共鳴。花朵出現在許多草間的早年繪畫和素描中，暗示她在松本市家族經營的苗圃裡成長的經歷。在拍攝於草間十歲時的一幀照片中，她幾乎被盛開的大朵菊花遮擋著。草間離開日本以後，花朵如圓點一樣，繼續是她的重要主題，曾出現在1960年代末她策動的行為展演中，也正好配合當時美國興起的「權力歸花兒」反文化運動。

1960年代末，草間首度涉足雕塑，並將自己界定為雕塑家，而非畫家或著色師（達米恩・赫斯特，摘自〈橫水之間〉，載於展覽圖錄，紐約，達米恩・赫斯特與草間彌生，《草間彌生：今》，羅伯特・米勒畫廊，1998年，頁134–140）。如本作般大型的雕塑一直是組成草間作品的重要部分。她曾接受多個重要戶外雕塑的委託項目，創作過類近傑夫・昆斯和保羅・麥卡錫作品的大型雕塑。2000年，草間首次製作巨型花卉雕塑，作品在湧水町的霧島藝術之森美術館展出。其後，她獲多個機構委託創作永久藏品，包括長野縣松本市美術館的《幻之華》（2002年作）、法國里爾厄拉里爾區的《香格里拉鬱金香》（2003年作），以及美國比華利山的《生命讚歌：鬱金香》（2007年作）。本作創作於2018年，是草間大型花卉雕塑之典範，展現了她精湛的雕塑藝術造詣；本作以銅鑄造，草間再為銅雕細心著色，讓雕塑表面產生目眩神迷的催眠效果，反映出啟發她畢生致力創作的獨特視野。

本作尺寸巨大，質感細膩，吸引觀者圍繞整個向外延伸的結構邊走邊看，從而參與其中，進行交流。縱向的葉子向外扭曲伸展，而花朵彷彿充滿生命力，渴望向上生長，整體形態有明顯的人形結構，葉如四肢，莖如脖頸，花如頭首，花朵中心就像一隻大眼睛。本作別具感染力，看起來天真爛漫，卻又似是不懷好意，完全展現了草間好用的二元對立。這種元素常見於草間複雜多元而，又能引起普世共鳴的非凡傑作之中。