Yayoi Kusama – Gagosian Gallery

To celebrate Yayoi Kusama's eightieth year, Gagosian Gallery is presenting until June 27 two major interrelated exhibitions of her recent work in New York and Los Angeles. The exhibitions will overlap to provide a bi-coastal overview of the renowned doyenne of the international art world.




Prepared for several years, Yayoi Kusama conceived some astonishing new works, such as “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009), a mesmerizing "infinity room" that operates on a system of simple yet ingenious optical devices. In a dark void, a delicate, shimmering mirage unfolds around the viewer, a myriad of gleaming lights that reproduce and reflect endlessly upon each other in golden silence. Titles of recent figurative paintings, in which worms, eyes, and other more indeterminate biomorphic forms abound, reflect a preoccupation with mortality, as well as with enlightenment, solitude, nothingness, and the mysteries of the physical and metaphysical universe. And, among all these spirited emanations, the sublime Infinity Net paintings -- from austere achromes to vibrant psychedelic contrasts -- continue to depict the undepictable in a steady, insistent pulse.”

In New York, we will also have the pleasure to see an application of her famous polka dots in a spectacular and vibrating yellow and black installation, also playing with our view. These polka dots are a recurrent motif issued from her childhood's hallucination, which she explored since the fifties. In her Manifest of Obliteration, she said “ My life is a polka dots lost among a million of others polka dots”. She thus developed this idea all her life, but always renewing the forms of expressions. Besides, Yayoi Kusama can be considered as a complete artist, since she also made films, fashion design and wrote novels and poetry. Today, she lives and work in Japan. From her own decision, she  now lives in a mental hospital in Tokyo, nearby her studio.

The exhibitions will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Louise Neri, Robert Nickas, a New York-based critic and curator, and Midori Yamamura, a Fellow at CUNY Graduate Center who is completing her PhD on Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929. Her work is in the collections of leading museums throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Major exhibitions of her work include Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan (1987); Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York (1989); "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958-1969", LACMA, 1998 (traveling to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), 1998-99; Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000 (traveling to selected venues in Europe and Korea), 2001-2003; "KUSAMATRIX", Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004 (traveling to Art Park Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo Art Park, Hokkaido); "Eternity – Modernity", National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004-2005; and "The Mirrored Years", Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008, currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and traveling to the City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand later in 2009.


[Visual : YAYOI KUSAMA, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009, Mixed media installation, 163 1/2 x 163 1/2 x 113 1/4 inches. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery]