Yayoi Kusama’s transcendent A Dream I dreamed yesterday from 2006 is a scintillating example of the artist’s decades-long contemplation of the interconnectivity between the universe and the lives of the people who inhabit it. Between 2004 and 2007, Kusama created a series of 50 black and white works overflowing with whimsical flowing patterns, the strands and circles dotted with a melange of tiny faces and figures appearing like squirming microorganisms teaming under the lens of a microscope. Bursting with vivacity and organicism, small forms flow into each other, grow and diminish, with an undulating rhythm so deeply tuned to nature that the viewer. Freely alternating between abstraction and figuration, the obsessive and abundant imagery includes Kusama’s signature polka dot motif. “Polka dots can’t stay alone, like the communicative life of people,” she has stated. “Two and three and more polka dots become movement. Our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity” (Yayoi Kusama, Manhattan Suicide Addict, Tokyo 1978). The multitude of polka dots, with their small imperfections and undulations, emanate a vitality that demands singular attention. Starting with a single dot, Kusama encompasses deep contemplation on the individual, nature, and the universe in this masterful work.

Diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis, Kusama has famously struggled with hallucinatory visions of infinitely oscillating, kaleidoscopic patterns since her earliest childhood in Japan. These hallucinations have fuelled her unique pictorial idiom throughout her career: “I was always standing at the centre of the obsession,” she recalls, “over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me" (Yayoi Kusama quoted in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103). Kusama describes sessions where she would paint ceaselessly for forty to fifty hours, the act of painting becoming not only a mode of creative production but moreover an exercise of expressive necessity. For her, painting is catharsis. Kusama’s hallucinations and mental illness are like the engine to the grander machine that drives her creativity and artistic masterpieces. Her disorder is deeply entwined with the forms she creates, informing the subject matter of her work. A Dream I dreamed yesterday typifies Kusama’s practice, illustrating her ability to create brilliance and conjure a seemingly impossible sense of infinity.