Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)

No S.C.H.T. stems from the revolutionary early years of Yayoi Kusama’s practice. Executed in 1952, while the artist was still living in Japan, No S.C.H.T. represents a vivid precursor to her ground-breaking Infinity Net paintings, characterised by their seemingly endless webs of tiny repeated dots. Kusama’s use of the polka dot motif – now synonymous with her oeuvre – was based on hallucinations she suffered as a child, in which coloured dots covered her body and surroundings. In her paintings, it became a means of looking beyond her personal psychological struggles, obliterating her physical and mental being into the infinite expanse of time and space. ‘Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos’, she explained. ‘Polka dots are a way to infinity’ (Y. Kusama, Manhattan Suicide Addict, Tokyo 1978).