Yayoi Kusama
The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as “Accumulations”, to her “Infinity Net” paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.
Posts tagged with Yayoi Kusama
Two peas in a pod at the opening of the Whitney’s Kusama exhibition.
“This is the best moment of my life,” Yayoi Kusama told Whitney Museum Director Adam Weinberg. On the brink of a retrospective at the museum and the unveiling of a much-hyped collaboration with Louis Vuitton, the eighty-two-year-old artist is most definitely on the rise.
Damien Hirst may have begun 2012 by becoming the art-world’s favorite spot painter with his globe-spanning series of exhibitions at Gagosian, but the British superstar must now contend for the title on his home turf. In February, the Tate Modern opened its retrospective exhibition of 150 works by renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, which now stands alongside the museum’s recently unveiled Hirst survey.
