ART CITIES: Copenhagen -Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born in Japan in 2/3/29 and she has become famous for her artistic universe of radiantly colourful, riotously branching patterns. They almost virally cover the surfaces of paintings and sculptures and spread out in large installations, where whole rooms are covered with polka dots in stark contrasts. Amidst this boundless visual universe stands Kusama herself, a strikingly present artistic persona who is not only behind the works, but often in front of them, frequently dressed in clothes in the same pattern as the paintings.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art Archive

According to Kusama’s own statements she had fled from home, from a controlling and violent mother and emigrated to the USA at the very time when new artistic currents like Pop Art and Minimalism were taking form. Kusama was a part of this milieu, but from her position as a non-western female artists she developed a highly distinctive artistic universe which stand today as an important, profoundly original contribution to the art of the post-war era. The artist presents her first retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art entitled “Yayoi Kusama – In Infinity”. The exhibition presents an outstanding selection of works, from the abstract, intensively handcrafted Infinity Net paintings, which became her breakthrough work in New York, through the soft, eroticized furniture sculptures covered in hundreds of white, penis-like forms, to works that shape whole spaces as intense, aestheticized environments. The exhibition is built up of thematic impacts that focus on moments of radical innovation in Kusama’s work. 
The first section “Sprouts”, is dedicated to the works of her youth, the earliest drawings and sketchbooks with nature subjects, which Kusama created as a self-taught artist in the Japanese provinces. The subsequent galleries focus on the ground-breaking change in Kusama’s work in the late 1950s when she emigrated to the USA and became part of the New York avant-garde scene. Under the theme heading “Infinity” a number of carefully selected works are shown from the painting series “Infinity Nets”, which became Kusama’s breakthrough work. In the next gallery “Accumulations”, stand soft, eroticized furniture-sculp¬tures covered in hundreds of white, penis-like shapes. Unlike the predominant currents in artistic milieux in New York, where Kusama got to know artists like Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, Kusama’s work was seductive and physical. It was in this period that she developed the fundamental themes around which her life’s work still revolves: fantasies 
of infinity, dizzying psychological spaces into which one can disappear, and the desire to dissolve the ego and be swallowed up by the world.The next space, “The Priestess of the Polka Dots”, unfurls through richly documented material, slide shows and rare, original design objects, the expanded practice into which Kusama progressed throughout the second half of the ‘60s. She organized political protests, happenings and body-painting parties, and established her own fashion design firm, Kusama Fashion Institute, all accompanied by a constant flow of press releases that functioned as marketing, artistic manifestos and social satire. In addition, the museum show major works from the period when she was one of the first artists to develop the installation genre. Particularly worth singling out is the installation “Polka Dot Love Room” (1967), which has been radically restored for the exhibition and is shown in its entirety for the first time since the ‘60s. At the beginning of the ‘70s Kusama returned to Japan. The next section, “Cosmos”, trains the spotlight on the turn that Kusama’s work took through the 1980s. Now the nature motifs from the earliest period returned, but in large paintings and sculptures where the synthetic and the organic clash in wild combinations. Many of these works have never been shown outside Japan. The last section of the exhibition, “Kusama’s world”, focuses on the idea of self-obliteration in Kusama’s contemporary work through performance videos and spatial installations. A special feature is the work “Mirror Room (Pumpkin)” (1991), an installation that was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and helped to give Kusama the status on the global contemporary art scene that she has today. Finally, the exhibition shows works from the latest series of paintings, “My Eternal Soul”, on which Kusama is still working.

Info: Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art, Gl 13, Strandvej, Humlebæk, Duration: 17/9/15-24/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-22:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://en.louisiana.dk