
Fauna
1 work

Tulipe I, 2000
Screen print
18 x 15 in 45.7 x 38.1 cm
Tulipe I, a screen print created by Yayoi Kusama in 2000 in an edition of 60, demonstrates the artist's profound and enduring engagement with floral forms as vehicles for her characteristic visual vocabulary. The work — its title a graceful Gallicism for the tulip — presents the flower's distinctive silhouette adorned with the artist's signature polka dots, a patterning that simultaneously defines and destabilizes the organic form beneath. Measuring 18 by 15 inches, the composition achieves an elegant balance between botanical recognizability and Kusama's obsessive graphic language. Flowers appear throughout Kusama's art with a frequency and commitment rivaling even her celebrated pumpkin series. For the artist, the flower — like the pumpkin, the mushroom, and the net — is a natural form that lends itself to infinite multiplication and transformation. In Tulipe I, the tulip's characteristic cup-and-stem profile becomes a scaffolding upon which Kusama constructs her characteristic field of dots, each circle a unit of a potentially boundless pattern. The clean precision of the screen print medium suits this approach perfectly, delivering saturated colors and crisp edges that give the image its striking graphic impact. Produced in a limited edition of just 60 impressions, Tulipe I is among the more restricted of Kusama's published floral prints from this period, making it particularly sought after by collectors drawn to the intimacy of her floral explorations. The work stands as a refined and accomplished example of Kusama's ability to find, within the most familiar of natural subjects, the infinite repeating patterns that have defined her remarkable artistic vision.


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.
The visual world Kusama has created across her long career rests on a small number of obsessively repeated motifs:
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.
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.
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.
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.