Yayoi Kusama

Throughout her distinguished career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences. Kusama's extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature, fashion (most notably in her 2012 and 2023 collaborations with Louis Vuitton) and product design.

An enduring feature of Kusama’s unique art is the intricate lattice of paint that covers the surface of her Infinity Net canvases, the negative spaces between the individual loops of these all-over patterns emerging as delicate polka dots. These motifs have their roots in hallucinations from which she has suffered since childhood, in which the world appears to her to be covered with proliferating forms. Forging a path between abstract expressionism and minimalism, Kusama first showed her white Infinity Nets in New York in the late 1950s to critical acclaim. She continues to develop their possibilities in monochromatic works which are covered with undulating meshes that seem to fluctuate and dissolve as the viewer moves around them.

Another key motif is the pumpkin form, which has achieved an almost mythical status in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home and the pumpkin continues to occupy a special place in her iconography. She has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture.

From these to Accumulation sculptures, where everyday objects are made uncanny with a covering of soft-sculpture phallic forms or dried macaroni, to monumental outdoor sculptures and installations, such as Narcissus Garden, originating in 1966 when Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale, and to the entrancing illusions of recent experiential Infinity Mirror Room installations, Kusama’s work is far-reaching, expansive and immersive.

Distilled within Kusama’s My Eternal Soul paintings, first begun in 2009, are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art. Each work in the series abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile and other more indeterminate forms recalling cell structures, often in pulsating combinations of colour. Paintings in a new series, entitled Every Day I Pray for Love, are created in a more intimate format and continue the artist’s singular explorations of line and form. Often minutely detailed, with characteristically bold accents of colour, they evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.

About the Artist

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, Kusama studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s, and by the mid-1960s had become well known in the avant-garde world for her provocative happenings and exhibitions.

Yayoi Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and currently lives and works in Tokyo, where the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in October 2017.

Recent institutional exhibitions include Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love at the San Francisco Museum of Art, CA, USA (2024); Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Rooms at Tate Modern, London, UK (2024); Yayoi Kusama: The Dutch Years 1965–1970 at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Netherlands (2023–24); Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA (2023–24); Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration / Psychedelic World, Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2023); Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons, The Warehouse, Factory International, Manchester, UK (2023); Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at M+, Hong Kong (2023), travelling to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (2023) and Museu de Arte Contempora?nea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2024);

One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, US (2022–23); Yayoi Kusama: My Soul Blooms Forever, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar (2022–23); Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP INTO THE UNIVERSE at PHI Foundation, Montre?al (2022–23). The artist’s first major exhibition in Germany, Yayoi Kusama:

A Retrospective – A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe was on view at Gropius Bau in Berlin (2021), travelling to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2021–22). Further recent institutional exhibitions include KUSAMA: COSMIC NATURE, inspired by Kusama’s lifelong engagement with nature and fascination with the natural world, held at the New York Botanical Garden, New York (2021).

In 2017, a significant North American tour of Kusama’s work began at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2017), travelling to Seattle Art Museum (2017), The Broad, Los Angeles (2017– 18), Art Gallery of Ontario (2018), Cleveland Museum of Art (2018) and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2018–19).

Further major international touring exhibitions include Infinity Mirrors, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, travelling to Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, USA (2018); Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, National Gallery of Singapore (2017); travelling to Queensland Art Gallery - Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017–18), and Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity, which travelled from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, (2015– 2016) to Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016) and Helsinki Art Museum (2016–2017). Kusama Yayoi: A Dream I Dreamed was first presented at the Daegu Art Museum, Korea (2013) and travelled subsequently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2013–2014); Seoul Arts Centre, Korea (2014); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015); and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2015). The widely acclaimed Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession toured from 2013 to 2015 at the South American institutional venues Malba – Fundacio?n Costantini, Buenos Aires (2013); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasi?lia (2013–14); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sa?o Paulo (2014); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014–15) and Fundacio?n CorpArtes, Santiago (2015). Previously, from 2012 to 2014 the large-scale exhibition Yayoi Kusama:

Eternity of Eternal Eternity

was staged in museums in Japan including The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Modern Art, Saitama; Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Matsumoto; Niigata City Art Museum, Niigata; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka; Oita Art Museum, Oita; The Museum of Art, Kochi; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto; Akita Senshu Museum of Art & A Akita Museum of Modern Art and Matsuzakaya Museum, Nagoya. A touring retrospective of the artist’s work was presented from 2011 to 2012 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofi?a, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Previous significant surveys include Mirrored Years, which travelled from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand from 2008–2009. Yayoi Kusama:

Eternity Modernity was presented at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2004), and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (2005).

Yayoi Kusama’s tallest bronze pumpkin sculpture to date, presented by Serpentine and The Royal Parks, London, was on view from 9 July until 3 November 2024. Standing at 6 metres tall and 5.5 metres in diameter, Pumpkin, 2024, was located by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens in dialogue with the surrounding environment.

Kusama’s first permanent and public UK installation for the new Elizabeth line station at Liverpool Street, titled Infinite Accumulation, has been unveiled in August 2024. The site-specific work develops the artist’s instantly recognisable motif – the polka dot – into a series of flowing, mirrored steel sculptures. Undulating tubular rods support a sequence of highly polished spheres, guiding passengers from the public spaces outside the station into the eastern entrance of the Elizabeth line station at Liverpool Street.