Flowers FW

Flowers FW belongs to Kusama's continuing engagement with floral imagery, which she has treated as a recurring subject across painting, sculpture, and installation since the 1980s. Sitting within the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) print tradition, the work takes a genre central to ukiyo-e — Hokusai's botanical sets, Koson's birds-on-branches — and reformulates it in flat screenprinted colour with Kusama's distinctive line. The 1993 print likely depicts one or several stylised blooms isolated against a saturated ground, petals rendered as tessellated arcs and stamens as concentric dots. Where traditional kacho-e seeks observed verisimilitude, Kusama's flowers are graphic constructions: the same biomorphic form recurs across many prints with variations of colour and dot pattern. The 'FW' suffix probably indicates a series or proof designation in the catalogue raisonné. The work belongs to the prolific early-1990s print activity centred on her Tokyo studio, the period during which her international reception — culminating in her 1993 representation of Japan at the Venice Biennale — was being consolidated.