Yayoi Kusama Retrospective

The retrospective traces Kusama’s extraordinary journey to her internationally celebrated status today, starting with rarely seen paintings and watercolors made in the early 1950s in her hometown of Matsumoto, Japan. While raised in an affluent family, Kusama, born in 1929, felt the impact of her parents’ unhappy marriage. “Perhaps triggered or at least exacerbated by these family tensions,” the curators note in the catalogue, “Yayoi, then not yet ten years old, began to suffer from perceptual changes that manifested themselves in auditory and visual hallucinations, which would later be diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. At times she heard animals and plants speaking to her, at other times she saw auras around things or experienced how repetitive patterns of flowers or dots spread across furniture, her own body, the entire room, and beyond. By indefatigably capturing the images of her altered perception in drawings, perhaps to reassure herself of their reality, Kusama, according to her own assessment, laid the foundation for her very own artistic language.”

Due to her ongoing health concerns, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. In Tokyo, she continued to reinvent her artistic language in deeply personal ways. She also focused increasingly on her writing, publishing her first novel Manhattan Suicide Addict, a fictionalized account of her New York years, in 1978. Many novels and collections of poetry and short stories have followed in the decades since, as well as her 2002 autobiography. 
 
At the same time, Kusama began experimenting with printmaking starting in the late 1970s. She also continued what began with the Accumulation sculptures with boxes filled with snakelike forms and assembled into monumental works. And beginning in the late 1980s, Kusama began making large abstract paintings in bright acrylic colors, some which she arranged into wide expanses of many panels. 
 
During this period, she had her first institutional retrospective in Japan, at the Kitakyushu Municipal Art Museum in 1987, followed by her first American museum retrospective in 1989, at New York’s Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA), confirming her global reputation and influence. 
 
In 1993, almost three decades after the creation of Narcissus Garden, Kusama was invited to be the first living woman artist to represent Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale. New works made after her return to Japan were also presented in solo exhibitions dedicated to both her New York and post-New York output in institutions like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. 
 
In addition to new sculptural forms, Infinity Mirror Rooms, and immersive environments, the work that Kusama has created over the last few decades, by now well known to most, includes the vibrant My Eternal Soul paintings. Begun in 2009, these works—intense, vivid, both abstract and figurative—are highly personal for the artist. Their use of repetition reflects the history of obsession in Kusama’s work, which itself comes from her desire to make art that is at once autobiographical and can exist outside the confines of the self. Likewise, her ongoing series of paintings Every Day I Pray For Love is a way for the artist to process her own life and work. As the catalogue notes, according to Kusama these colorful paintings “contain motifs and imagery from her youth, coming full circle in a never-ending abundance of Kusama’s messages to the world.”