Ota Fine Arts is pleased to present 1 Plate, 1 Color, 1 Run: Etchings by Yayoi Kusama, an online viewing room dedicated to a focused selection of monochrome print works by Yayoi Kusama.

Bringing together a group of Kusama’s black-and-white etchings, this presentation highlights a body of work in which repetition, accumulation, and proliferating forms emerge with particular clarity. Stripped of colour, these works reveal the structural foundations of Kusama’s visual language in an immediate and distilled form.

For Kusama, printmaking has long provided an important means of exploring repetition, accumulation, and infinity. This presentation focuses primarily on minimal and highly abstract compositions, drawing attention to the formal rigour and tension inherent in her print practice. Dense networks of lines, subtle relationships between positive and negative space, and quietly rhythmic repetitions evoke the sense of infinity that the artist has pursued throughout her career, articulated here through the restrained language of monochrome.

By stepping away from the strongly iconic imagery often associated with Kusama’s work, this online presentation foregrounds the abstract qualities and material specificity of printmaking itself. It is conceived both as an accessible entry point for new audiences and as an opportunity for longtime collectors to reconsider Kusama’s practice from a different perspective.

“At that time, Kusama was making lithographs and etchings in the hospital corridor. She later told me that there was no heating there and her hands were frozen stiff as she worked on the etchings."  

Kimura Kihachi *

Many of Kusama’s etchings were produced in close collaboration with master printer Kimura Kihachi, notably during 1984–85 and 1994–95. Kimura recalled the artist working in an unheated hospital corridor, gripping her stylus with hands numbed by cold. Rather than eliminating incidental scratches or irregularities created during the etching process, Kusama embraced them as integral elements of the image, intensifying the works’ vitality and psychological charge.

As a medium fundamentally rooted in reproduction, printmaking offered a particularly resonant framework for her lifelong exploration of infinity. Few artistic practices demonstrate such a close correspondence between concept and medium.

* Kimura Kihachi quotation from Printer Kihachi: Artists Whom He Supported (Kimura Kihachi Print Studio, 2009), p. 90. Additional contextual interpretation adapted from an essay by Akira Shibutami.

** Charlotte Sarrazin, “Yayoi Kusama,” in Yayoi Kusama, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Hatje Cantz, 2025, p. 228.