Born in Japan in 1929, Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary artists, who found herself at the epicenter of the New York avant-garde. She began covering surfaces with the polka dots – now a trademark of her work. According to Kusama, “A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm.”

Her earliest recorded work with dots, drawn at age 10, depicts a Japanese woman in a kimono, presumably the artist’s mother, covered and obliterated by spots. The pieces in her first public series were large scale, sometimes more than 30 ft-long canvas paintings, she called, Infinity Nets. These works were entirely covered in a sequence of nets and dots that alluded to hallucinatory images. In 2012 at The Whitney Museum in NYC I stood, enthralled, before these Infinity Nets, so captivated that I felt sleepy - like Dorothy in the Poppies.