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Culture

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama exhibits at NY's Whitney Museum

by Sharon Krum | July 12th 2012 | 08:45 pm

Yayoi Kusama, b. 1929, 'Fireflies on the Water', 2002. Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water, Overall: 111 x 144 1/2 x 144 1/2 in. (281.9 x 367 x 367 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Postwar Committee and the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittenborn Miller 2003.322a-tttttttt. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery

If all you knew about Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was that she’s been called 'the princess of polka dots', it would be tempting to dismiss her and her work as frivolous or simplistic. Yet the 83-year-old is definitely neither, and while her dot paintings, soft sculptures and installations have long been lauded by the art world, 2012 is the year Kusama is seriously going global and mainstream.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Self-Obliteration No. 1, 1962―7. Watercolor, ink, graphite, and photocollage on paper, 15 7/8 x 19 13/16 in. (40.4 x 50.4 cm). Collection of the artist. © Yayoi Kusama. Image courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and Gagosian Gallery, New York

With a career retrospective just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, (previously on show in Madrid, Paris and London) and a collaboration with Louis Vuitton on a dot-infused collection of clothes, accessories and bags, Kusama is in the extraordinary position of being celebrated as a genius while becoming the latest bride in the marriage of high art and luxury retail.

“She might be a small woman, but she is a powerful one,” says Whitney director Adam Weinberg of the artist impossible to miss in public, thanks to her bright red wig. Since 1977, Kusama has lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo by choice, but works every day. “The range of what she has produced is truly extraordinary.”

While the Whitney exhibition covers sixty prolific years of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and collage created while living in Japan and New York, Weinberg considers the show special for another reason. “It brings her back to the city where, as she said, Kusama has become Kusama.”

Kusama’s work has multiple signatures, but the two overriding themes are infinity nets and those infamous dots – soon to become collector’s items among Louis Vuitton aficionados. She once explained her dot obsession, which she has used to cover floors, walls – even people – as reflecting her being “a single particle among billions”.

Yet her dot and net artwork make up just a portion of the exhibition, which gratifies both the senses and intellect. It showcases early paintings and drawings, archival material and a series of acrylic canvases vivid in colour and biological imagery. Her fabric phallic sculptures known as 'Accumulations', used to cover shoes, furniture and even a boat, confronts and surprises, while the installation 'Fireflies on the Water' (pictured at top), is breathtaking in its beauty.

With 150 lights hanging inside a tiny room consisting of a shallow pool and mirrors, the experience alters your sense of time and space like great art should.

'Yayoi Kusama' runs to September 30th, 2012.

Visit the Whitney Museum online
See Kusama's Louis Vuitton collaboration