Yayoi Kusama

YAYOI KUSAMA (Matsumoto, Japan, 1929).
“Pumpkin,” (Red) 2021.
Silkscreened canvas.
Edition unknown.
Measurements: 33 x 90 cm.

Yayoi Kusama is an artist and writer who, throughout her artistic career, has experimented with and developed a wide variety of artistic techniques, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance, and installations, most of which reflect her thematic interest in psychedelia. Kusama is a pioneer of the Pop Art, Minimalism, and feminist art movements and influenced contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Born in Matsumoto (Nagano) into an upper-middle-class family of seed merchants, Kusama began to develop an interest in art at a very early age, which led her to study Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this Japanese style, she became interested in the American and European avant-garde, holding 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 shifted to sculpture and installation as her primary media and became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, with her works exhibited alongside those of 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 caught the public’s attention when she organized a series of happenings in which she painted naked participants with brightly colored polka dots. She returned to Japan permanently in 1973, where she has lived ever since in a psychiatric hospital, voluntarily admitted. Throughout her career, Kusama has been honored with major 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 gained particular renown for her installations featuring mirrors, red balloons, toys, and other objects, in the midst of which she herself was positioned as part of the scene. Her works from recent years are naive-style paintings on cardboard. Among the most recent exhibitions dedicated to her work is the comprehensive retrospective organized by the M.N.C.A. Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London, in 2011, which subsequently traveled to the Tate Modern itself, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Kusama’s work is currently represented at MoMA in New York, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Museum 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.