Yayoi Kusama // Cloud Considering, 1991

  • Yayoi Kusama, Cloud Considering, 1991–92. Acrylic on canvas diptych, overall 162 × 260 cm. A large-scale 1990s work transforming natural imagery into an immersive meditation on infinity.
    Cloud Considering, 1991–1992
    Acrylic on canvas, diptych, each 162 × 130 cm (63 × 51 1/8 in.), overall 162 × 260 cm (63 × 102 3/8 in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only.
     
    Painted between 1991 and 1992, Cloud Considering demonstrates Kusama’s ability to scale her signature visual language to expansive, immersive formats. Executed as a diptych, the monumental work surrounds the viewer with a field of obsessive pattern and luminous colour, echoing both the boundlessness of natural phenomena and the infinity of the cosmos. The title suggests a contemplative relationship between the organic and the transcendental, linking her interior visions to universal themes of impermanence and vastness.
     
    This period marked Kusama’s international resurgence, as major retrospectives and exhibitions reintroduced her art to global audiences. Works such as Cloud Considering embody the maturity of her practice in the 1990s: repetition and accumulation remained at the heart of her compositions, yet the scale and ambition signalled a renewed confidence and a clear articulation of her lifelong obsessions.

  • “Accumulation is the result of my obsession, and obsession is the wellspring of my art.”

     – Yayoi Kusama

    Through this diptych, Kusama transforms the ephemeral image of drifting clouds into a meditation on the infinite. The fleeting quality of clouds, which shift and dissolve almost as soon as they form, becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human experience. By repeating forms across two monumental canvases, she turns impermanence into pattern, allowing what is momentary to take on a sense of timelessness. In doing so, Kusama bridges the physical and the psychological, the fleeting and the eternal, creating a work that speaks both to her private obsessions and to universal themes of change, continuity, and infinity.