Yayoi Kusama

YAYOI KUSAMA (Matsumoto, Japan, 1929).
"Pumpkin," 2004.
Screen-printed canvas.
Signature printed on a label.
Measurements: 18 x 26 cm.
Soft round sculpture whose shape represents a yellow pumpkin with black moles, of different sizes, arranged on it. This piece is established as a paradigm of Yayoi Kusama's art, since it shows the representation most used by the artist, which is the pumpkin, in addition to the yellow and black colors, a pattern that is very common in her pieces and performances.
Yayoi Kusama is an artist and writer who throughout her artistic career, has experimented and developed a variety of artistic techniques including painting, collage, sculpture and performance and installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelia. Kusama is a forerunner of the pop art, minimalism and feminist art movements and influenced artists contemporary to her such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Born in Matsumoto (Nagano) to an upper middle-class family of seed merchants, Kusama began to develop an interest in art from an early age, which led her to study Nihonga (Japanese-style paintings) in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this Japanese style, she became interested in American and European avant-garde, mounting several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by abstract expressionism. Kusama switched to sculpture and installation as her primary media and became a fixture of New York avant-garde with her works exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal in the early 1960s when the artist became associated with the Pop Art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which nude participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. She returned to Japan permanently in 1973, where she has lived ever since in a psychiatric hospital, committed of her own free will. Throughout her career, Kusama has received important awards both in Japan and abroad, including the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2003 and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale in 2006, in the category of painting. This artist has acquired special notoriety for her installations with mirrors, red balloons, toys and other objects, in the middle of which she placed herself on stage. Her works of recent years are paintings on cardboard in an ingenuist style. Among the most recent exhibitions dedicated to her production, the complete retrospective dedicated to her by the M.N.C.A. Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London, in 2011, which later traveled to the same Tate, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York, stands out. Kusama is currently represented at MoMA in New York, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Art Institute of Chicago and many other museums and art centers around the world.