Get ready to step into the vibrant, fun and mesmerizing world of the one and only and legendary Yayoi Kusama, explore her eighty years of life and work. From her early days of work on paper and avant-garde performances to large-scale paintings and sculptures; corridors; heavy patterning; disorienting spaces and her immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms - My Heart Filled with Sparkling Lights has its world premier in Melbourne. Not forgetting by not missing out on her globally renowned trademark polka-dot pumpkins and flowers sculptures that have captivated so many of us worldwide which are key to transforming art into an unforgettable experience in the 21st century. From Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 to you, then, now and future, the sky is (her) the limit and you will truly be inspired. mylifestylenews writes.
<PUMPKINS>Kusama first saw a pumpkin as a primary-school student while visiting a seed-harvesting nursery with her grandfather. Among yellow flowering vines, she discovered a pumpkin the size of a man’s head and as she went to pluck it, it began to speak to her in an animated manner. Kusama adopted the pumpkin as a recurring motif in her art.Kusama created her first pumpkin painting as a teenage in 1946. She likened the ritual of painting pumpkins to Zen meditation: “ I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else, and concentrate my mind entirely on the form before me.
In the late 1970s Kusama returned to one of the most nurturing and wondrous life forms of her childhood. Initially painting yellow-and-black or black-and-white dotted pumpkins, she has seamlessly transformed the image of the pumpkin into sculptures, infinity mirror rooms and a multitude of commercial product's, elevating it to one of the most recognized icons of contemporary art worldwide.
<The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens>
In 1991 Kusama created Mirror Room (Pumpkin), her first immersive mirror room in over two decades, Exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale, a mysterious cube set at the centre of a yellow-and-black polka-dotted room.
Visitors were invited to look through a small opening in the cube’s exterior to see the scene hidden within: a fantastical mirrored landscape of pumpkin sculptures. It is a reprisal of this early pumpkin room. Inside the cube, the original handpainted pumpkins have been replaced by glowing pumpkins lanterns.
<RETURNED TO THE WORLDSTAGE>
In 1973, Kusama returned permanently to Japan where, after some years of isolation and introversion, she began to exhibit again. She was represented in a major survey of contemporary Japanese art in 1981 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, cementing her place within the national art scene. It was not long until Kusama returned to the world stage.
In 1989 her first international retrospective exhibition was staged at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, and in 1993 she was the first solo contemporary artist to represent Japan at Venice Biennale.
In work produced during these final decades of the twentieth century, Kusama simultaneously looks back at the past and towards the future. Her soft botanical sculptures and repetitive multi-panel paintings recall her Accumulations of Infinity Nets of the 1950s and 1960s, while also broadening her artistic exploration of natural and cosmic worlds. Kusama’s expanded vision was realized anew in Dots Obsession, 1996, an environment populated with polka-dotted inflatables.
These works have since been realized in many variations, incorporating mirrors since 1998. This marked an evolution in the artist’s groundbreaking infinity mirror rooms of the 1960s.
<Genesis>
Genesis is one of several large sculptural installations Kusama created between 1976 and 1994 in which wooden boxes each filled with stuffed fabric forms and painted silver, are stacked to make a grid. These works are an extension of her earlier Accumulation sculptures; however, in Genesis, the soft phallic shapes are replaced by elongated and intertwined biomorphic forms resembling vines, roots and even bodily organs. Each box in Genesis is not only a container suggesting stifling confinement, but also has a generative quality, like cells that divide and multiply to produce a cast web or nexus. The work’s title speaks directly to this process of creation.
<Soul Burning Flashes (A.B.Q.)>
Towards the end of the 1980s, Kusama produced series of multi-panel paintings. In these monumental works, she references the endlessness of nature and the cosmos by using repetitive all-over motifs Soul Burning Flashes (A.B.Q.) comprises four panels, each teeming with life.
<Revived Soul>
Kusama was commissioned to paint Revived Soul in commemoration of the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The triptych’s title alludes to the remembrance of the souls of the deceased in the hearts of those still living.
Often read as a forest of dead trees, the vertical, trunk-like forms that cover the surface of the work are formed by an alternating density of white dots ringed by black paint. In Kusama’s visual language, gathered dots express the endlessness of the universe. The repetitive visual patterns pf her multi-panel paintings of this period offer a view towards the cosmos beyond.
<The Galaxy>
When you look up at the night sky, what do you imagine might be out there? Over time, Yayoi has grown more and more fascinated by the universe and its vastness. This big paining, and many nearby, are all about life on earth, the universe, and what lies beyond. Notice the circles expanding across the surface of the painting. For Yayoi, dots symbolise our connection with everything around us. She once said:” Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.”
A profusion of dots with tiny tails evokes tadpoles wriggling in a pond, or sperm viewed through in microscope. As in Kusama’s earlier Infinity Net paintings. The energy of this motifs appears on the verge of breaking free from the canvas’s edge to proliferate throughout the universe.
<Dot Obsession>
Kusama premiered Dots Obsession - her first walk-through room featuring inflated forms - in 1996. This new format extended Kusama’s ongoing preoccupation with dots by inviting visitors into an all-encompassing art environment. For Kusama, dots symbolise both the individual and, when presented in great numbers, the cosmos.
This dual meaning suggests that all things are interconnected, with Kusama’s visualisation of infinite dots signifying her ongoing pursuit of “self-obliteration”. Upon entering Dots Obsession, with its proliferation of mirrors and polka dots creating the illusion of endlessness, visitors are invited to contemplate their place within the universe.
“Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.”
Yayoi Kusama, 1968
<KUSAMA IN THE 21st CENTURY>
Since 2000 Yayoi Kusama has become one of the world’s most recognized artists. From major international survey exhibitions and monumental sculptures installed in public spaces to wider-spread recognition of her signature motifs and striking visual identity (most notably, her new wig), Kusama has become a key figure in popular culture.
In 2016 she was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world.
In the twenty-first century, Kusama’s rise has been amplified by the power of social media. Images of the artist’s infinity mirror rooms and collaborations with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton have introduced an audience of many millions to her art.
Despite her larger-than-life status, Kusama remains committed to making art that is deeply personal.
Whether in poetry, paintings of large site-specific installations or infinity mirror rooms, Kusama expresses reasons for hope in the face of existential infinitude. Her creativity is her lifeline.
<Works From The Love Forever Series 2004-07>
Kusama has produced three major painting series in the twenty-first century. The first is Love Forever, fifty line drawings originally made with market pen on canvas and subsequently reproduced as screenprints.
The series title reprises Kusama’s catchcry - her own version of the countercultural slogan “Make Love, Not War” - which she printed on buttons and distributed at the opening of her Castellance Gallery exhibition in 1966.
In this series, however, Kusama’s imagery is far from the world of happenings, activism and anti-war protests that dominated her 1960s practice in New York.Using a marker pen, she gradually filled the empty picture plane with wondrous imagery inspired by childhood memories and emotions.
Yayoi Kusama in her iconic new wig<The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe>
In a 1968 interview, Kusama spoke of her interests in the infinite quality of nature. She described this as “a mysterious energy or feeling in the infinity” that “comes up growing and growing, never stops”. This description comes to life in this immersive environment in which visitors move through a forest of yellow-and-black polka-dotted forms.
Throughout her career, and across virtually all media, Kusama has referenced, repeated and re-imagined structures and cycles found in nature.
This all-encompassing artwork, in which six-metre-tall tendrils appear to write and intersect overhead, serves as a reminder of the artist’s enduring affinity with and respect for the natural world.
“Polka dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three and more polka dots becomes movements.”
Yayoi Kusama, 1968
<KUSAMA NOW>
In 2002 Kusama published her autobiography, in which she wrote:
“What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire. It would be futile and meaningless to focus on the shrinking time frame before me, or to think of my limitations. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will live forever.”
Kusama’s vision continues to expand, whether painting in solitude or developing new work, site-specific installations and mirror rooms.
<Love is Calling>
This work is a landscape of inflated, polka-dotted tentacular forms extending from the floor and the ceiling. These irregular snaking shapes are illuminated and gradually change colour. The walls are clad with mirrors, reflecting this fantastical landscape into infinity.
The artist’s voice can be heard reciting her poem “residing in a Castle of She tears”. Written in 2020, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s desire to spread a universal message of love. An English translation can be read on the screen nearby.
A new infinity mirror room is presented here for the first time alongside a selection of recent paintings created since 2021. During this time, Kusama’s mobility has decreased and her living space has become working space.
Consequently, the size of her canvases has reduced. These paintings are filled with imagery drawn from nature and childhood memories, as well as other ideas that have preoccupied the artist since her earliest years in Matsumoto. Kusama’s ongoing, prolific output is a testament to her undiminished drive to create art.
The inspiring and immersive exhibition has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary culture like no other with a high sensory experience and captivating artwork.
Although Kusama has experimented with a variety of media and forms of expression, her fundamental motivation for creating art remains the same and seeks to convey the complex beauty of the natural world and explore her (and our) place in an infinitely expanding universe and turns the impossible possible through her unique vision of the world.To the People of Melbourne,
Since birth I have always transmitted, through resplendent art, a message of Love to the world. It is love that illuminates our lives and makes life beautiful. I aim to deliver in my art a heartfelt prayer. My hope is to experience the beauty of a world where Peace and Love have fully arrived. It is in celebration of this everlasting hope that I offer Love to my eternal humankind.
Yayoi Kusama, 2024
Kusama surrounded by paintings from
Everyday I Pray For Love
YAYOI KUSAMA
National Gallery of Victoria
15 December 2024 – 21 April 2025
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