“I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.”

“I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live. “

“A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing.”

“Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment. Take off your clothes. Forget yourself. Make love.”

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into a conservative family who did not support her artistic ambition. Her childhood was shaped by a repressive home life and hallucinations accompanied her throughout her life. Featuring fragmented flashing lights, fields of dots and endless nets, these recurring visions would later form the foundation of her practice. As a fine art student in Kyoto, she initially learned painting in the Japanese modernist Nihonga style but soon found the genre too restrictive. In 1958 she boldly emigrated to New York, defying family and societal expectations in pursuit of an artistic career.

Arriving in Manhattan during the height of postwar abstraction, Kusama was faced with the brutal realities of a male-dominated, Western-centric art world. Nonetheless, she quickly established herself in the New York art scene with her monumental paintings, soft sculptures and environmental installations. Her famous ‘Infinity Nets’ series (1960s–2026), depicting small, repetitive marks across vast canvases, solidified the artist’s position as a leading figure in the avant-garde community. Often taking up to fifty hours to complete, these hypnotic paintings showcased Kusama’s obsessive commitment to what she refers to as ‘self-obliteration’, a meditative fusion of the self with its surrounding environment.

Throughout the 1960s, Kusama expanded her practice to encompass performance art and public happenings, interrogating the social and moral ideologies of her time. Her subversive body painting protests and love-ins, staged in front of landmarks such as the New York Stock Exchange, Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, used nudity and polka dots to challenge a wide range of topics, from the ongoing Vietnam war to America’s sexual prudishness and the art world’s conservatism. In one of her most famous provocations, Narcissus Garden (1966), she scattered hundreds of reflective silver spheres on the lawn at the Venice Biennale as an uninvited artist, selling them to visitors as a commentary on the commodification of the contemporary art market. Kusama’s radical approach broke down the boundaries between art and audience, individual and collective, championing an immersive call for civil activism. courtesy of Frieze Magazine the whole article

I’m Here, But Nothing

“Infinity Mirrors”

Sculptures and paintings from My Eternal Soul (begun in 2009) Credit:Tyrone Turner for The New York Times

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins  (2016) Credit: Tyrone Turner for The New York Times

Photo by Alex Majoli (Magnum Pictures)

The Yayoi Kusama Museum Opened Oct.2, 2017 in Tokyo.

—

Dorothy Tanner had told me that she and Mel visited Yayoi Kusama’s studio in New York in the mid-1960s when Kusama was creating art with macaroni as her medium. It is fascinating that soon they would all be using light as a medium. – Barry Raphael

—

 “Since 1977, Ms. Kusama has lived by choice in a mental hospital in Tokyo due to nervous disorders and hallucinations stemming from childhood. She continues to paint and create to this day in her artist studio across the street from the psychiatric hospital.” The Observer

Yayoi Kusama Created Fantastical ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’ That Became the Art World’s Most Famous Backdrops. Her Work Spanned Counterculture to the Cosmos  (Smithsonian)