Marie Laurberg, Jo Applin, Stefan Würrer

The book accompanies the exposition Yayoi Kusama, 17/9/2015-24/1/2016
Agenda>
 
This autumn Louisiana Museum of Modern Art devotes the South Wing of the museum to an extensive retrospective exhibition of the work of one of Japan’s great artistic individualists, Yayoi Kusama. Kusama was born in Japan in 1929 and in recent decades she has become famous for her artistic universe of radiantly colourful, riotously branching patterns which almost virally cover the surfaces of paintings and sculptures and spread out in large installations where whole rooms – walls, floors and ceilings – are covered with polka dots in stark contrasts such as black and yellow, or white and red. Amidst this boundless visual universe stands Kusama herself; a strikingly present artistic persona who is not only behind the works, but often in front of them – in photographs, frequently dressed in clothes in the same pattern as the paintings; an artistic camouflage strategy that makes her merge visually with her art.
 
Behind Kusama’s brilliantly colourful contemporary work lies the story of a young woman from the Japanese provinces who emigrated to the USA at the very time when new artistic currents like Pop Art and minimalism were taking form. Kusama was a part of this milieu, but from her position as a non-western female artist she developed a highly distinctive artistic universe which stands today as an important, profoundly original contribution to the art of the post-war era. The exhibition presents an outstanding selection of these works; from the abstract, intensively hand-crafted Infinity Net paintings, which became her breakthrough work in New York, through the soft, eroticized furniture sculptures covered in hundreds of white, penis-like forms, to works that shape whole spaces as intense, aestheticized environments. Unlike the dominant currents that surrounded her, Kusama’s work of the 1960s is seductive, physical, eroticized and psychologizing. It was in this period that she developed the fundamental themes around which her whole life’s work revolves: fantasies of infinity, dizzying psychological spaces into which one can disappear, and the desire to dissolve the ego and be swallowed up by the world.
 
The exhibition Yayoi Kusama – Towards Infinity unfurls the whole of Kusama’s life’s work: from early watercolours and pastels to her ground-breaking paintings and sculptures from the 1960s, her broader practice in the fields of psychedelic film, performances, installations and political happenings in the 1960s and the early 1970s to her work in fashion design and literature. Besides the formative period in the New York of the 1960s, the exhibition will shed new light on works from the 1980s, after the artist’s return to Tokyo – many of which have never been shown outside Japan. The exhibition also includes several of Kusama’s recent installations, where the potentially endless pattern of dots already anticipated in the earliest drawings unfolds in large spatial environments. In addition the now 86-year-old Kusama is showing a series of new paintings done especially for Louisiana’s exhibition.