ART-TRIBUTE:Yayoi Kusama-In Infinity
Yayoi Kusama is the most famous artist to emerge from Japan in the period following World War II. Part of the international art scene in the early ‘60s, she exhibited in New York with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and other Pop and Minimalist artist and in Europe with the Dutch Nul and the German Zero artist groups.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
“In Infinity” is the first comprehensive exhibition highlighting Yayoi Kusama’s interest in fashion and design. In addition to her own fashion label, The Nude Fashion Company, the exhibition includes works from her partnerships with and the design collective graf (2000) and Louis Vuitton (2012). Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre is presented by a rich selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures, along with large-scale spatial installations and material from her happenings and performances in New York in the ‘60s. The exhibition includes her new installation “Infinity Mirrored Room-Hymn of Life“ (2015) and one of her most renowned works “Narcissus Garden” (1966), which was Kusama’s initiative first presented at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and celebrates its 50th anniversary 2016 and is also on presentation at Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Since the ‘50s, Yayoi Kusama has created art that is as personal as it is universal. Like few other artists she moves freely between painting, sculpture and installations, between art and design, and between East and West. In 1957 Yayoi Kusama left Japan for New York. Here, at the heart of the ‘60s art scene, she created many of her seminal works, characterised by the impulse to allow one shape or pattern take over and repeat itself infinitely. In the series “Infinity Nets”, Kusama methodically filled large canvases with semicircles in white, impasto oil paint, like the mesh of an infinite net. In her series of “Accumulation Sculptures”, everyday objects are covered with stuffed, phallic textile protuberances, a poignant theme that challenged the caucus of male critics. The late ‘60s was an intensely creative period for Kusama, and her artistic activities expanded to breaking point. She organised collective art happenings, political performances and staged Anti-war protests. The participants wore clothes designed by Kusama, but just as often the clothes came off, in protest against the establishment. In Body Paint Festivals Kusama painted polka dots on nude bodies and appointed herself the “High Priestess of Polka Dots”. She founded the magazine Kusama’s Orgy and designed avant-garde fashion for her own label, The Nude Fashion Company. As a non-Western woman in a male art world, Yayoi Kusama was an outsider, a position she emphasised and occasionally played with. In the early ‘70s, Kusama left New York. Some years later she resumed her artistic practice in Tokyo, making monumental paintings and sculptures. In the works from the mid-‘80s, Kusama revisited the polka dots and nets that had been a motif throughout her artistic career, but they now appeared in vivid colors, with references to nature and even more stylized patterns. The yellow pumpkin became a recurring motif in Kusama’s works during this period. In an effort to put words to her experiences, Kusama talks about the concept of self-obliteration, a notion of becoming one with the surroundings, of dissolving the boundaries of the Self, of disappearing through her works into an all-embracing nothingness. This notion inspired her to develop her ideas into spatial installations.
Info: Curator: Jo Widoff, Assistant curator: Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmenm Stockholm & ArkDes, Exercisplan 4, Stockholm, Duration: 11/6-11/9/16, Days & Hours: Both Venues: Tue 10:00-20:0, Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se & www.arkdes.se
