Yayoi Kusama
One of the largest markets in contemporary art, and one of the most counterfeited — which makes the certificate the first question.
Kusama has been making the same few things since the 1950s, and the market sorts sharply between them. The Infinity Net paintings, begun in New York in 1959, and the soft Accumulation sculptures of the 1960s are the historically serious work and sit at the top. The pumpkins, in painting and in sculpture, are the images that carry the name globally. Beneath those is an enormous output of prints, editioned objects, collaborations and licensed product, much of it produced through her Tokyo studio and much of it excellent — but not interchangeable with the paintings, and routinely conflated with them.
Authentication is the practical centre of this market. The Yayoi Kusama Studio in Tokyo is the only body that issues certificates, and in a field this heavily forged a work without one is very difficult to place. Counterfeits circulate at every level: fake pumpkin sculptures, fake prints, and paintings good enough to have reached salerooms. This is one of the few artists where we would advise an owner not to commit to a sale route at all until the paperwork position is settled, because discovering it late is expensive.
The pumpkin sculptures are where identification most often goes wrong. The same form exists in many editions, sizes, materials and colourways — painted bronze, fibreglass-reinforced plastic, lacquered wood, small resin multiples in editions of several hundred — and photographs flatten those differences almost completely. Edition size, material, dimensions and the presence of the original box and certificate are what separate a five-figure object from a six- or seven-figure one.
Kusama's story is inseparable from the work and has become part of how it is read: the hallucinations of proliferating dots since childhood, the years in New York, the return to Japan in 1973, and the psychiatric hospital in Tokyo she has lived in voluntarily since 1977, working daily in a studio across the road. That biography is not decoration on the market. It is a large part of why the reassessment that began with the 1993 Venice Biennale has never stopped.
At auction
- White No. 28$7.9m
- Oil on canvas, 1960 · Christie's, New York · 17 May 2019
- Christie's, as widely reported
- An early Infinity Net, and the artist's auction record.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Selling a work
We represent the seller rather than the auction house: comparing houses and sale dates, negotiating the seller's terms, and keeping the paperwork and remittance in your name. What sets the value of a Yayoi Kusama sets out what we look at first.