BLOOMS

Flowers that bloom at midnight is a series of large scale sculptures, each with its distinct boisterous color scheme. Flowers have, for a long time being an essential part of Kusama’s oeuvre. She uses their metaphorical properties to reflect many of her conceptual preoccupations, along with her disregard for dichotomies.

She first started incorporating flowers in her works in the late 1990s, which also marked her departure from a painter or colorist to a sculptor.

Each flower measures between four and six feet high and cast in long-lasting fiberglass-coated plastic and metal. They are hand-painted in gallant opaque subtractive colors with the artist’s signature polka dot she refers to as infinity nets. In her childhood, Kusama would experience hallucinations in which a large number of flowers would blossom, fill the space around her, and communicate with her.

Featuring large scale and corporeal physicality, this series compels the audience to participate and interact with it by walking around its outcrops. The giant flower appears animated, with its vertical and outward twisting and stretching of leaves. It seems eager to get up and come to life. Its form is uniquely anthropomorphic, with a stem resembling a neck, leaves the limbs, and the blossom the head. The capitulum is swapped with a giant eye.

The flowers’ subtractive colors and infinity nets are believed to have been influenced by color fielding painting. This is a type of abstract painting in which the whole picture or surface consists of large expanses of more or less unmodulated color, with no strong contrasts of tone or obvious focus of attention. Flowers that bloom at midnight might have also been influenced by pop art, a movement based on the imagery of consumerism and pop culture, which was prominent in the late 1950s to early 1970s, mainly in Britain and the United States.

KUSAMA’S FLOWERS SYMBOLIZE LIFE AND DEATH, MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY, AND CELEBRATION AND MOURNING. THEIR COMPLEX FORM – FRAGILE, ORGANIC, FINDING UNIQUENESS THROUGH REPETITION – FINDS RESONANCE
THROUGHOUT HER WORK.

“From a very young age, I used to carry my sketchbook down to the seed-harvesting grounds. I would sit among beds of violets, lost in thought. One day I suddenly looked up to find that every violet had its own individual, human-like facial expression, and to my astonishment, they were talking to me… They were all like little human faces looking at me.”
– Kusama Yayoi