Yayoi Kusama is now considered one of the most important contemporary Japanese artists. She has worked across a wide range of disciplines, including visual art, dance, fashion, design, writing and musical composition.
Her body of work encompasses Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Art Brut, Pop Art, Land Art and even Psychedelia.
Yet it is by delving into her earliest experiences that we find the key to understanding her artistic journey. Since childhood, Yayoi has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and recurring hallucinations, stemming from repeated domestic abuse.
During an episode at the age of twelve, the red flower pattern on a tablecloth began to reproduce endlessly throughout the room. From that moment on, it would obsessively inhabit her entire visual universe.
Polka dots and giant flowers, nets, soft protrusions and phallic forms. The obsessive repetition, multiplication and accumulation of this limited vocabulary of shapes would become the stylistic signature of her work.
Like Louise Bourgeois, another grande dame of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama recreates her visions through artistic practice as a way of mastering them, transforming their threatening proliferation into a means of salvation and an escape towards a liberating entropy.
Her art seeks to investigate the perception of the cosmos and infinity, while also celebrating the beauty of life. Her enormous, brightly coloured flowers express the regeneration, growth and transition that define the natural cycle. Her polka dots, meanwhile, represent a form of dematerialisation, comparable to the pulsations of the cosmos and the movements of celestial bodies.
Kusama continues to explore the concept of infinity through her Infinity Mirror Rooms, moving beyond the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and into an environment of reflected images. The kaleidoscopic effect of the mirrored surfaces creates an inexhaustible space in which the body is fragmented by the walls and reproduced endlessly.
Another visual delirium is the installation Gleaming Lights of the Souls. Reinterpreting Pollock’s all-over technique, the artist uses a room entirely lined with mirrors, transforming it into an optical box where dozens of suspended LEDs cast an intermittent light from the ceiling. The images proliferate, multiply and dissolve into one another, extending endlessly into infinity.
