YAYOI KUSAMA

Kusama’s work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures.

In the late 2000s, Kusama began her ongoing ‘My Eternal Soul’ paintings, which feature the signature allover qualities of her ‘Infinity Nets’ and echo the obsessive, recurring geometries of her decades-long output. Conveying the extraordinary vitality that characterizes Kusama’s oeuvre, each composition is an innovative exploration of form, subject matter, and space, in which abstract and figurative elements combine to offer impressions of both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Initially as large as two meters square, the works have been intimately scaled down in recent years. These paintings are often installed in tightly spaced grids of varying sizes, and renew familiar motifs and symbols. They encompass a spirited palette of vibrant hues and pulse with dynamic lines and biomorphic shapes that recall eyes and human faces. Both reiterative and singularly expressive, these canvases hum with the disquiet that informs our daily lives as well as the self-reflexive gestures that steady the artist’s hand.

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, and her work has been featured widely in both solo and group presentations. She presented her first solo show in her native Japan in 1952. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking and influential happenings, events, and exhibitions. Her work gained renewed widespread recognition in the late 1980s following a number of international solo exhibitions, including shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, both of which took place in 1989. She represented Japan in 1993 at the 45th Venice Biennale, to much critical acclaim. In 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-organised Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968, which toured to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1998–1999), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1999).

The first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work is currently on view at Gropius Bau, Berlin, through August 15, 2021. Kusama: Cosmic Nature is also currently on view at The New York Botanical Garden through October 31, 2021, and Tate Modern, London, is presenting Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms through June 12, 2022.

Yayoi Kusama Museum, a museum dedicated to the artist’s work, opened October 1, 2017, in Tokyo with the inaugural exhibition Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art. Currently on view through December 26, 2021, is Midway between Mystery and Symbol: Yayoi Kusama’s Monochrome, the museum’s eighth exhibition devoted to her work.

Kusama has been represented by David Zwirner since 2013. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition with the artist, titled I Who Have Arrived in Heaven, spanned all three spaces at West 19^th Street in New York in 2013. Subsequent solo shows of the artist’s work at David Zwirner, New York, include Give Me Love in 2015; Festival of Life, concurrently presented with Infinity Nets, in 2017; and EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE in 2019.

In 2011 to 2012, her work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective that travelled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From 2012 through 2015, three major museum solo presentations of the artist’s work simultaneously travelled to important institutions throughout Japan, Asia, and Central and South America. In 2015, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, organised a comprehensive overview of Kusama’s practice that travelled to Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Helsinki Art Museum. In 2017 to 2019, a major survey of the artist’s work, Infinity Mirrors, was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Seattle Art Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Yayoi Kusama: Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow, which marked the first large-scale exhibition of Kusama’s work in Southeast Asia, opened at the National Gallery of Singapore in 2017 and traveled to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta.

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among numerous others. Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.

Learn more via David Zwirner.