Yayoi Kusama // A Canal in Amsterdam, 1987

  • Yayoi Kusama, A Canal in Amsterdam, 1987. Acrylic on canvas, 38 × 45.5 cm. A late 1980s work where Kusama transforms a European cityscape into a psychological landscape through pattern and rhythm.
    A Canal in Amsterdam, 1987
    Acrylic on canvas, 38 × 45.5 cm (15 × 17 7/8 in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. All rights reserved. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only. 
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    Painted in 1987, A Canal in Amsterdam highlights Kusama’s engagement with specific places and memories during the later decades of her career. While her pumpkins, nets, and dots became her most iconic motifs, here she channels her repetitive, patterned style into a landscape subject, transforming the urban environment into a field of obsessive rhythm.
     
    The work reflects her ability to merge external reality with internal vision. By reimagining the canals of Amsterdam, a city associated with trade, history, and cultural exchange, through her signature patterns and vivid colour, Kusama created a scene that is both representational and abstract. The canal becomes less a literal view and more a psychological landscape, charged with the same intensity she brought to her domestic objects and organic motifs.

  • “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.”

     – Yayoi Kusama

    This painting also demonstrates how, by the late 1980s, Kusama had fully consolidated a mature style that could flexibly adapt her visual language across a wide range of subjects. Whether addressing intimate domestic objects, natural motifs such as pumpkins or butterflies, or entire landscapes like A Canal in Amsterdam, she applied the same obsessive rhythm of pattern and colour. This adaptability allowed her work to resonate across scales and contexts, from small canvases to large installations, while maintaining a recognisable signature style. At the core of this approach remained her central themes of obsession, repetition, and infinity, ideas that gave coherence to her diverse output and cemented her place as one of the most distinctive artistic voices of the 20th century.