Legendary, semi-reclusive, and still vibrant, Kusama has created an extensive body of work since the 1940s. Ranging from her earliest explorations in painting to new works made in the past few years, this survey celebrates a career of exceptional duration and distinction, tracing the development of Kusama into one of the most respected and influential artists of her time.
Yayoi Kusama - whose work spans more than six decades of
intense productivity in Japan and the United States - is the subject of a retrospective opening at
the Whitney Museum of American Art on July 12, 2012. Legendary, semi-reclusive, and still
vibrant, Kusama, who turned 83 in March, has created an extensive body of work since the
1940s. Ranging from her earliest explorations in painting to new works made in the past few
years, this survey - the artist’s first major exhibition in New York in fifteen years - celebrates a
career of exceptional duration and distinction, tracing the development of Kusama into one of the
most respected and influential artists of her time.
On view at the Whitney through September 30, the traveling exhibition is organized in
collaboration with Tate Modern and has been seen over the past year in Madrid, Paris, and
London; the Whitney is its final stop. It was curated by Frances Morris, Tate’s Head of
Collections (International Art). The Whitney installation is overseen by curator David Kiehl.
Both Tate and Whitney presentations are supported by Louis Vuitton.
In 1989, Kusama was given important solo exhibitions at the Center for International
Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England. In 1993, she
participated in the 45th Venice Biennale. As Chris Dercon, director of Tate Modern, notes in his
foreword to the catalogue, “This is the first large-scale museum retrospective of Kusama’s career
to be staged in the west since Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968, the seminal survey of her
work organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Japan Foundation in
1998...Love Forever focused exclusively on Kusama’s production during her years in the United
States. This exhibition, by contrast, seeks to show the full breadth of the artist’s output
throughout her lengthy and varied career, contextualizing Kusama’s American sojourn with
representations of her early and late career in Japan.”
Yayoi Kusama’s art encompasses an astonishing array of media, including painting, drawing,
sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring
semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculptures known as Accumulations, to her Infinity Net paintings,
made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns, to the dense patterns of
polka dots for which she is perhaps best known. Like her near contemporaries Eva Hesse, Louise
Bourgeois, and Nancy Spero, Kusama’s work has gained over time the recognition it deserves,
following periods in which her work was received with acclaim and other periods in which she
was almost completely overlooked.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically, in a sequence of rooms, each devoted to the emergence
of a new artistic phase. Much of Kusama’s art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects
her unique vision of the world, whether through obsessively recurring imagery, a teeming
accumulation of detail, or the dense patterns of nets and polka dots that have become her
signature.
Kusama is also renowned for her environments, immersive, large-scale installations of dazzling
power. The Whitney’s installation includes her extraordinary Fireflies on the Water (2002),
shown here in our 2004 Biennial and now part of the Whitney’s collection. As described by
Christian Rattemeyer in the 2004 Biennial catalogue: “The reflective interior environment
consists of a small room lined with mirrors on all sides, a pool in the center of the space, and 150
small lights hanging from the ceiling, creating a dazzling effect of direct and reflected light
emanating from both the mirrors and the water’s surface. Fireflies embodies an almost
hallucinatory approach to reality, while shifting the mood from her earlier, more unsettling
installations toward a more ethereal, almost spiritual experience.”
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. In her early career she immersed herself
in the study of art, integrating a wide range of Eastern and Western influences, training in
traditional Japanese painting while also exploring the European and American avant-garde.
Kusama arrived in New York in 1958, where she worked hard to gain recognition. In the 1960s
and early 1970s she became a major figure in the New York avant-garde, associated with key
developments in Pop, Minimalism, and performance art, and exhibiting alongside artists she
came to know well, including Donald Judd (her downtown loft neighbor), Andy Warhol, Joseph
Cornell, and Claes Oldenburg. The exhibition includes a group of Kusama’s first Infinity Net
paintings from her early years in New York, canvases covered in unceasing, scalloped
brushstrokes of a single color. Kusama forged her own direction in sculpture and installation,
adopting techniques of montage and soft sculpture. The exhibition includes a significant
selection of her classic Accumulation Sculptures dating from 1962 to 1968.
As the 1960s progressed, Kusama moved from painting, sculpture, and collage to installations,
films, performances, and happenings as well as political actions, counter-cultural events, fashion
design, and publishing. The exhibition includes Kusama’s iconic film Kusama’s Self-
Obliteration (1968), capturing this period of performative experimentation, and an extensive
selection of archival material revealing the ways in which Kusama’s artistic activity extended
beyond the boundaries of the gallery.
After achieving fame and a certain prominence in New York through her groundbreaking and
prescient art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth in 1973. The exhibition
includes a selection of the vibrant and evocative collages she created on her return, during a
period in which she was also forging a parallel career as a poet and novelist. Major sculptural
installations include The Clouds (1984), comprising one hundred unique black and white sprayed
sewed stuffed cushions, and Heaven and Earth (1991), which features snake-like forms
emerging from forty boxes. The exhibition concludes with a series of works from the last decade.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major new catalogue (published by D.A.P.) and the first
English translation of Kusama’s autobiography Infinity Net (University of Chicago Press).
Yayoi Kusama is curated by Frances Morris, Head of Collections, International Art, Tate, with
Rachel Taylor, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition has been organized by Tate
Modern in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre
Pompidou, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Exhibition Support
Supported by Louis Vuitton
Additional support for the Whitney’s presentation of Yayoi Kusama is provided by The Gage
Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, and Linda and Andrew Safran.
About Louis Vuitton and Art
A symbol of elegance and style throughout the world, Louis Vuitton has cultivated a close
relationship with the world of art since its founding in 1854. Inventing the art of travel, Louis
Vuitton and his successors kept pace with a rapidly changing age, working with the most
accomplished engineers, decorators, painters, photographers and designers of the day. This
fascination with ever-new forms of expression grew through the subsequent decades and
continues today under the guidance of its Artistic Director, Marc Jacobs. Following on from
Louis Vuitton’s previous collaborations in the 1980s with painters such as César, Sol LeWitt and
Olivier Debré, Marc Jacobs has since invited some of the world’s most renowned contemporary
artists to join forces with Louis Vuitton, increasing the points of exchange between art and
fashion to an unprecedented degree. Among these artistic partnerships, Takashi Murakami,
Richard Prince, and the late Stephen Sprouse interacted directly with the Maison’s iconic
Monogram, freely appropriating its forms and visual identity. Collaborations between Louis
Vuitton and other artists have taken a variety of forms such as “Louis Vuitton Art Talks”
organized worldwide with various artists, contemporary art exhibitions in cultural spaces named
“Espace Louis Vuitton” in Paris, Tokyo or Singapore, and commissions for site-specific
installations in Louis Vuitton stores and windows.
About the Whitney
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and
contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the
Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection,
which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the
most promising and influential artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the
Museum's signature exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of
contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum is
known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a
center for research, scholarship, and conservation.
Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first
housed on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th
Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison
Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues
uptown, the Whitney is moving forward with a new building project, designed by Renzo Piano,
in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the
Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has
generated immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the size
and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on the new building in
May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.
Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water Opens June 13, 2012
Sharon Hayes June 21-September 9, 2012
Signs & Symbols June 28-October 28, 2012
Oskar Fischinger June 28-October 28, 2012
Yayoi Kusama July 12-September 30, 2012
Image: Kusama with latest paintings at Tokyo 2011, Musashi University, Tokyo. Collection Yayoi Kusama. Image courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and Gagosian Gallery New York
Whitney Museum Press Office:
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Opening 12 July
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