The source of this work is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c.1450), housed in the San Marco Museum in Florence. The scene, in which the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive Christ and Mary accepts this message, is a well-known episode from the New Testament.
The “Seventh Seal” refers to a passage in the Book of Revelation: when the seventh seal is broken, a profound silence fills heaven, and God and His angels appear.In this work, one can discern Yokoo Tadanori’s view of art―namely, that the essential role of art is to convey the will of the universe, or of the divine, through artistic expression. Encountering the major Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York led Yokoo to shift fully into painting in 1981. His large-scale exhibition Yokoo Tadanori: Neo-Roman Baroque was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in 1987 as a culmination of his early pictorial practice. Yokoo later recalled that this was a period filled with both conviction and uncertainty about art.
From the early 1990s, when the present work was painted, Yokoo increasingly proposed an artistic mode that was closer to the soul―one intertwined with spirituality. Through divine revelation transmitted from soul to soul, from spirit to spirit, the work depicts the birth of the painter emerging from the reclining female body.