Like so many female artists of her generation, the world-famous Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama had to work hard to gain attention in the male-dominated art scene. Against her mother's will, she began to draw at the age of 10 and completed a training in traditional "Nihonga" painting at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts. Despite receiving little attention in Japan, she continued to pursue her goals with determination. In November 1955, she wrote in a letter to the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe with great confidence: "Will you please forgive me to interrupt you while you are very busy, and let me introduce myself to you? I am a Japanese female painter (. ) I have been looking for the way to make friends with you for a long time." (quoted from: Doryun Chong, Mika Yoshitake (eds.), Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, London 2022, p. 321). In December the same year, she received an answer from Georgia O'Keeffe, who offered to show her works in galleries and to support her plans from then on. Just a few years later, Yayoi Kusama moved to New York. Before the trip, she sew banknotes into her kimonos so that she would be able to finance her livelihood in the early days. Having arrived in New York in 1959, she made her first "Infinity Nets", which were part of her first solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery. She found inspiration for these patterns and structures, which can be continued indefinitely, on a flight over the Pacific during which Yayoi Kusama was impressed by the vastness of the ocean when she looked out of the window. Fellow artists, and the movement of Minimalism in general, met her works with great enthusiasm. Donald Judd reviewed her first show in New York, and Frank Stella bought a work with a black and yellow pattern for $75.

However, she was still denied her great breakthrough in the USA at that time. After almost two decades, she finally returned to her homeland in the early 1970s. She worked as a writer and checked herself into Tokyo's Seiwa Hospital, a mental institution, in 1977. Around 1988, however, a visible change took place in her life and work. Not only did she finally gain increasing public attention after so many years, for example with her first retrospective show at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum in 1987 or with her participation in the Venice Biennale in 1993, her art also began to change. Exuberant colors, playful constellations of forms and cosmic titles such as "Between Heaven and Earth" or "The Return to Eternity" would henceforth characterize her work. At around the same time the present work was created, her art was subject to the exhibition "Beyond Obsession". In a kind of manifesto presented in the exhibition catalog, Yayoi Kusama wrote: "In the previous history, the end of the century was always dark and filled with mental ill-ness, grotesqueness and fear of uncertainty. But that has all changed now. With our inner glowing energy that captures the soul burning flashes, let us open a shining door to the new age, the 21st Century." (Yayoi Kusama, Beyond Obsession (sic!), 1988). With its shimmering pink pattern floating in the bright white space that could be continued beyond the edges, the present "Flash towards the 21st Century" from 1988 clearly emanates this this positive tone. To this day, the artist keeps striving for a visual representation of infinity in her works, in modified forms and colors, but always with an unbroken will to reach the seemingly unreachable. The work from 1988 almost seems like a foreboding, as Yayoi Kusama is one of the world’s leading artists today, and has conquered the art world with her perseverance and an oeuvre, which spans more than eight decades: She opened a shining door to the 21st century herself. [AR]