Fauna
1 work
Yayoi Kusama Hat Left Behind in the Field For Sale
Yayoi Kusama
Hat Left Behind in the Field, 1981
Screenprint
16 x 20 1/2 in 40.5 x 52 cm
Edition
Edition of 100
About this work
Yayoi Kusama's prints depicting clothing, hats, shoes, bags, and other fashion accessories are a captivating exploration of identity, consumer culture, and the intersection of art and everyday life. Throughout her career, Kusama has employed various mediums to examine the relationship between the individual and their surroundings, often using fashion as a lens through which to explore themes of self-expression and societal norms. Kusama's prints of clothing and accessories are characterized by their bold colors, playful patterns, and whimsical imagery. Drawing inspiration from her own experiences and surroundings, Kusama transforms mundane objects into vibrant works of art, imbuing them with her signature style and distinctive voice. In these prints, everyday items are elevated to the realm of the fantastical, inviting viewers to reconsider their perceptions of the familiar. At the heart of Kusama's prints lies a deep fascination with the concept of identity and the ways in which we present ourselves to the world. By depicting clothing and accessories, Kusama explores the role of fashion as a form of self-expression and communication, as well as its power to shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. Through her art, Kusama challenges conventional notions of beauty and gender, embracing a sense of fluidity and playfulness that defies categorization. Moreover, Kusama's prints of clothing and accessories serve as a commentary on consumer culture and the commodification of art. By appropriating images from the world of fashion, Kusama confronts the viewer with questions about value, authenticity, and the nature of artistic creation. In doing so, she encourages us to reconsider our relationship to material possessions and to think critically about the ways in which we define ourselves in an increasingly consumer-driven society. Overall, Yayoi Kusama's prints of clothing, hats, shoes, bags, and other fashion accessories are a testament to her boundless creativity and her ability to find beauty and meaning in the everyday. Through her art, Kusama invites us to see the world through new eyes, encouraging us to embrace the joy and wonder of the world around us.
Price on Application
Auction History
Hat Left Behind in the Field · Yayoi Kusama · Sotheby's · 2015-10 · $41,935
More from this series
More series by Yayoi Kusama
About the Hats & Shoes Series
Yayoi Kusama Hats & Shoes Prints For Sale
Rare Early Works Demonstrating Kusama's Mastery of Everyday Objects
The market for Yayoi Kusama's prints continues to demonstrate exceptional strength as collectors worldwide seek authenticated works from the artist's most distinctive series. With the global art market returning to growth in 2025 according to Art Basel & UBS reporting, and Guy Hepner having facilitated $561,250 in Yayoi Kusama transactions, the Hats & Shoes series represents a compelling opportunity within Kusama's broader print oeuvre. These works from the early 1980s through late 1990s showcase the artist's signature approach to transforming mundane objects into vehicles for her obsessive patterning and philosophical exploration.
Series Context and Historical Significance
Created primarily between 1982 and 1999, the Hats & Shoes series emerges from a pivotal period in Kusama's career. Following her return to Japan in 1973 and voluntary admission to Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in 1977, Kusama entered an extraordinarily productive phase of printmaking that would solidify her position in the contemporary art canon. While her Infinity Nets and Pumpkin works commanded auction headlines—including the remarkable $6.7 million achieved for Pumpkin YB (1994) at Sotheby's in 2021 and $5.1 million for Infinity Nets (1959) at Christie's the same year—the Hats & Shoes series reveals an equally sophisticated engagement with pattern, repetition, and the transformation of everyday objects.
These prints demonstrate Kusama's lifelong fascination with accumulation and obliteration—philosophical concepts she developed during her groundbreaking New York period from 1958 to 1973. By focusing on accessories, objects intimately connected to the body and personal identity, Kusama creates visual meditations on presence and absence, the self and its dissolution. The hats and shoes become vessels for her signature polka dots and organic patterns, transforming functional items into portals for contemplating infinity.
Technical Excellence and Printmaking Innovation
The Hats & Shoes series showcases Kusama's sophisticated understanding of printmaking techniques across multiple mediums. The works employ screenprint, lithograph, and silkscreen processes, each selected to achieve specific visual effects that amplify the artist's conceptual intentions.
Hat (Red) and Hat (Yellow) from 1983 utilize screen printing to achieve the saturated, vibrant color fields characteristic of Kusama's most celebrated works. The medium allows for precise registration of her dot patterns while maintaining the luminous quality that defines her approach to color. These companion pieces demonstrate the artist's systematic exploration of chromatic variation within a consistent compositional framework.
Hat from 1982, rendered as a lithograph, reveals a different textural quality—the stone-based process lending a softer, more organic feel to the imagery while maintaining Kusama's characteristic precision. Hat-S (Kusama 19) from the same year returns to screen printing, suggesting the artist's deliberate experimentation with how different printmaking methods affect viewer perception of identical subject matter.
The Shoes works from 1985, including both the screenprint and silkscreen variations designated as Shoes and Shoes I, present footwear as subjects for Kusama's transformative vision. Green Shoes extends this investigation with its distinctive palette, while Highheel 4 from 1999 introduces lamé elements, adding dimensional and reflective qualities that connect to Kusama's concurrent exploration of materiality in her sculptural installations.
Notable Works and Market Positioning
Each work within the Hats & Shoes series offers distinct characteristics appealing to different collector priorities:
Hat (Red) and Hat (Yellow), 1983: These screen prints represent essential examples of Kusama's approach to serial imagery. Their bold colorways and pristine technique make them anchor works for collections focused on 1980s Japanese contemporary printmaking. The pairing potential appeals to collectors seeking dialogic installations.
Shoes and Shoes I, 1985: The subtle variations between these works illuminate Kusama's process-driven methodology. Collectors interested in technical distinctions within an artist's practice find particular value in acquiring related variations.
Highheel 4, 1999: This later work incorporating lamé on paper bridges Kusama's print practice with her increasingly elaborate material explorations of the 1990s. Its hybrid nature positions it at the intersection of multiple collecting categories.
Hat, 1982 (Lithograph): As the earliest work in the series and the only lithograph, this piece holds particular significance for collectors focused on technical diversity and chronological completeness.
Investment Analysis and Market Trajectory
While the Hats & Shoes series lacks the dedicated auction record depth of Kusama's Pumpkin or Infinity Nets works, several market factors support strong collector interest. The global art market's $57.5 billion valuation in 2024, as documented by Art Basel & UBS, reflects sustained appetite for established contemporary artists with institutional validation. Kusama's major retrospectives at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum, and MoMA have cemented her canonical status, while her Infinity Mirror Rooms continue attracting unprecedented public engagement worldwide.
Works on paper by major contemporary artists have demonstrated resilient performance at Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips, and Bonhams, with collectors increasingly recognizing prints as accessible entry points into blue-chip artists' practices. The Hats & Shoes series, with its limited production and historical significance within Kusama's development, offers compelling value relative to her most sought-after paintings and sculptures.
Acquisition Through Guy Hepner
Guy Hepner in New York provides comprehensive acquisition services for Yayoi Kusama's Hats & Shoes series, supported by documented transaction expertise totaling $561,250 in Kusama works. Our specialists offer authentication guidance, condition assessment, and strategic acquisition planning for collectors at every level.
Contact Guy Hepner to discuss available works and current market opportunities within this distinguished series.
About Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama Prints For Sale
Yayoi Kusama prints for sale at Guy Hepner Gallery in New York include Infinity Net editions, pumpkin screenprints, dot works, Flower Ball multiples, and the full range of her extraordinary print output — representing one of the most consistently in-demand bodies of work in the contemporary edition market. For collectors seeking Yayoi Kusama art for sale, Guy Hepner at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York offers expert guidance, authenticated works across all her major print series, and access to a market that has demonstrated exceptional sustained strength.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is the highest-selling living female artist in the world and one of the most instantly recognisable visual presences in contemporary art — an artist whose dots, nets, pumpkins, and Infinity Mirror Rooms have achieved a cultural ubiquity that coexists, without diminishing, with the genuine psychological intensity from which her work emerged. Kusama began making art as a child as a means of processing the hallucinations she experienced — flowers speaking to her, the self dissolving into fields of pattern and repetition — and the therapeutic impetus has never separated itself from the formal achievement. The work is not illustration of pathology but its transformation into aesthetic proposition.
Kusama received traditional Japanese painting training before moving to New York in 1958, where she became a conspicuous and somewhat isolated figure in an avant-garde largely indifferent to her practice. Her Infinity Net paintings — monumental canvases covered in an unbroken weave of looping marks applied with obsessive labour — anticipated the Minimalist investigation of serial mark-making while remaining intensely personal, each loop a unit in an accumulation too vast to resolve into pattern.
Kusama's Signature Motifs: Dots, Nets, Pumpkins, and Flowers
The visual world Kusama has created across her long career rests on a small number of obsessively repeated motifs:
- Dots — polka dots covering surfaces, objects, environments, and her own body; the dot is Kusama's most fundamental formal unit and the motif most directly connected to her childhood hallucinations. Dot prints span the full arc of her career and remain the most accessible entry point into her edition market.
- Infinity Nets — her first mature breakthrough; the obsessive network of repeating loops that anticipates Minimalism while remaining utterly personal. Net prints and works on paper from the 1960s are among the rarest and most historically significant objects in her output.
- Pumpkins — bronze and fibreglass sculptures of comic gravity and formal authority that began appearing in the 1990s and have become among the most beloved objects in contemporary sculpture. Pumpkin prints and multiples are among the most actively traded works in her edition market.
- Flower Ball — large-scale sphere compositions made of dense, repeating flower motifs; among her most distinctive and immediately recognisable works in print and sculpture form
- Infinity Mirror Room imagery — works referencing or documenting her immersive installation environments; rare and highly sought
Yayoi Kusama Paintings For Sale
Kusama's auction record stands at $7,109,000 for Infinity Nets (TW) at Christie's, with multiple major Net canvases from the late 1950s and 1960s achieving $5,000,000+ at Sotheby's and Christie's. An Infinity Nets canvas from 1959 achieved $5,098,000 at Christie's in November 2021. She has held the record for the highest auction result achieved by a living female artist for many years. Her major paintings — particularly early Net works and large-scale Infinity environments — are held primarily in institutional collections or by committed long-term private collectors and rarely come to market.
Yayoi Kusama Print Editions: What to Know
Her print editions — featuring signature dot and pumpkin imagery — are among the most actively traded in the contemporary edition market, with strong global demand across price points. Kusama has worked with publishers in Japan and internationally to produce editions across all major print media: screenprints, lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings.
Print prices range from $8,000–$15,000 for smaller open-style editions through $50,000–$200,000+ for rare signed limited editions featuring pumpkins, infinity net patterns, or dot works in high demand colourways. Works produced in collaboration with Ota Fine Arts and other authorised publishers carry the strongest provenance.
What to Look For When Buying Yayoi Kusama Art
Motif: Pumpkin works and infinity net prints consistently outperform generic dot compositions. Flower Ball works carry strong demand. Early net works on paper, if available, are among the rarest and most historically significant objects in her output.
Edition size and signature: Small-edition signed prints carry significant premium over open editions. Certificates of authenticity from Ota Fine Arts or the artist's studio are essential for any significant acquisition.
Colourway: Yellow and black pumpkin works (echoing her iconic Naoshima installation) carry premium. Red and white, gold, and silver colourways in dot and net works also command strong demand.
Condition: Kusama's prints are typically produced on quality substrates, but UV protection and stable storage are critical to long-term value preservation.
Provenance: Works with direct gallery provenance from Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, or Zwirner hold value most reliably.
Yayoi Kusama Art For Sale at Guy Hepner Gallery, New York
Kusama's work is held in permanent collections at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Hirshhorn Museum, and The Broad in Los Angeles. A landmark joint retrospective toured Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney, and MoMA in 2012. She continues to produce work daily from her studio in Tokyo.
Guy Hepner offers authenticated Yayoi Kusama art for sale with full provenance documentation from our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York. We provide expert guidance on acquisition, free and confidential valuations for those wishing to sell, and access to a global network of collectors actively seeking her work across all media and price points. Whether you are seeking Yayoi Kusama prints for sale in a specific motif or colourway, or exploring her broader edition output, Guy Hepner is the right starting point.