Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Untitled, circa 1970, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 60 x 50.4 cm, Private Collection

Born at Matsumato, Nagano in March of 1929, Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose work is based in conceptual art expressed primarily through sculpture and installations. She is actively engaged in painting, performance art, video art, fashion, and writing both poetry and fiction.

Kusama received training for a year at the Kyoto City University of Arts in the traditional Japanese painting style known as nihonga ( 日本画 ), an art form that typically uses mineral pigments and occasionally ink with other organic pigments on paper or silk. She was active in the New York City avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, organizing “happenings” and experimenting with her series of “Mirror/Infinity” installations.

In 1969, Yayoi Kusama founded Kusama Enterprises, a commercial outlet selling clothing, bags, and even cars. These products feature her singular aesthetic, characterized by her liberal use of polka dots and dense, repeating patterns to create a sense of infinity. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. Two years later, seeking treatment for her obsessive-compulsive neurosis, she entered a facility where she lives and works to this day.

Kusama continues to produce paintings and sculpture, and, in the 1980s, added poetry and fiction to her range of creative pursuits. She exhibited at the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale. Kusama’s dazzling mirrored pavilion room was filled with small pumpkin sculptures. Eventually, she produced a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture with an optical pattern of black spots, for her a representation of an alter-ego or self-portrait.

In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Kusama’s work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. That same year the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo. Other major retrospectives of her work have been held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, and London’s Tate Modern in 2012.

“The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.”

—Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

The Art work of Yayoi Kusama: Photo Set Two

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism. Her art is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, the Tate Modern in 2012, and the Hirshhorn in 2017.

Yayoi Kusama

The Art work of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design.

Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, and Tate Modern in 2012. In 2006, she received a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, Christie’s New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.