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"An American master"

Celebrating Ruth Asawa

Phaidon x David Zwirner Books

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Josef Albers, Yayoi Kusama, and more

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A holiday photo by Cynthia Zarin of a canal in Venice.

Cynthia Zarin

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To Venice and Rome

 brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.

With a new focus on Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating poetic titles of her paintings, such as in 

I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART

. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else.

Centered around 

, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this book features more than three hundred pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirrored Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

A photo of a book by Yayoi Kusama, titled Every Day I Pray for Love, published in 2020.

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love

The artist's most personal book to date

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray For Love

On the occasion of our 20/20 exhibition, the artist shared her reflections on the year

A MESSAGE FROM YAYOI KUSAMA

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The Yayoi Kusama Phenomenon

 is on view at The New York Botanical Garden through October 31, 2021. Titled 

, this presentation explores the artist’s lifelong engagement with nature, and will include multiple installations, from signature mirrored environments and organic forms, to polka-dotted sculptures of flowers and pumpkins, paintings, and a participatory greenhouse installation that will be transformed over the course of the exhibition. Also on display are sketchbooks demonstrating an early fascination with the natural world that continues to inspire Kusama’s work.

A sculpture by Yayoi kusama, titled Dancing Pumpkin, dated 202.

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At the New York Botanical Garden

KUSAMA: COSMIC NATURE

In 2020

A MESSAGE FROM YAYOI KUSAMA TO THE WHOLE WORLD

 are pleased to announce that they will jointly present new 

 in London, Tokyo, and New York this summer. A dynamic installation of canvases will be unveiled at Victoria Miro in London on 4 June as part of a major exhibition of new paintings and sculptures. Later in June, exhibitions of 

paintings will be presented at David Zwirner, New York, on 17 June and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, on 19 June.

The paintings that will be on view are new examples drawn from the artist’s highly celebrated, ongoing 

series, which she commenced in 2009 and has worked on in a more intimate format since 2019. At once bold and intensely detailed and conveying extraordinary vitality, these works are joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual. They abound with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots with which the artist is synonymous, to offer impressions of worlds both abstract and figurative, microscopic and macroscopic. Their use of minute details and repetition—in terms of both shapes and brushwork—reflects the history of the obsessive gesture within Kusama’s practice, positioning this body of work as an important link between her past and present.

In April 2020, Kusama released 

 in the form of a poem of resilience and hope. It included the words, ‘In the midst of this historic menace, a brief burst of light points to the future. Let us joyfully sing this song of a splendid future. Let’s go …’ A full year later and Kusama wishes to share with the world these personal and poignant paintings that she has created throughout this most historic of times.



 is currently on view at The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, until 31 October 2021. 

 opens at the Gropius Bau in Berlin on 23 April 2021 and will be presented until 15 August 2021. 

 opens this spring at Tate Modern in London.

Image: Yayoi Kusama. Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

A photo of Yayoi kusama with her paintings. Photo by  Yusuke Miyazaki.

A detail from a painting by 	Yayoi Kusama, titled I WHO SLEEP IN A ILLUSION WORLD, dated 2020.

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Yayoi Kusama to Present New Work this Summer

David Zwirner Books, Academy of American Poets, and McNally Jackson held a webinar with poets, critics and curators, as they read from and discussed Yayoi Kusama’s most personal book to date. Celebrating the relationship between visual art and language, this wide-ranging conversation focused on the state of poetry today.



 brings us into Kusama’s private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.

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 (Coffee House Press, 2020). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is a senior editor of 

.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is poet, photographer, and novelist. Her hybrid collection of poetry and photography, 

 (W.W. Norton 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is the recipient of fellowships including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her novel 

 is forthcoming from Random House.

Stephanie Rosenthal has been Director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin since 2018. She has curated numerous exhibitions including

Wu Tsang: There is no non-violent way to look at somebody 

Otobong Nkanga: There Is No Such Thing as Solid Ground 

(2020).

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, 

, forthcoming from Penguin in February 2022. Their work appears in 

, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie 

 with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. Winner of the Discovery/

 Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

A detail from a painting by Yayoi Kusama, titled SPLENDOR OF STARS CHANGING INTO BLUE, dated 2019.

Live readings from Every Day I Pray for Love

Yayoi Kusama: Poetry Now

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.