“After her passing, I still can’t fully calm down. Yayoi Kusama left so many works of art and memories… I feel she is here, now. She shared her entire life with us through her work. We saw her passion for art, her determination to achieve ambitious goals, her fighting spirit and bravery, her loneliness and anxiety. And her sense of humor. Above all, she shared her eternal love and soul. A single dot represented billions of love and life. And today the world is full of hundreds of dots.” The words of Takako Fujibayashi, from Yayoi Kusama’s studio, receive great applause. It is the press presentation of an exhibition that was going to celebrate Kusama’s long and exceptional life at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And now, after the artist’s dissolution into the cosmos on August 14 at the age of 97, it celebrates a visionary, a pioneer of minimalism, radical performance, and immersive installations.
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The exhibition, with three hundred works and open until January 17, celebrates a woman who broke family and social molds, who embodied the rebellious freedom and joy of the sixties across the US and half of Europe with happenings where she painted her dots on the naked bodies of men and women that ended in happy orgiastic piles. A woman who descended into hell in the seventies, admitted to a mental clinic. And who reemerged as a global symbol of art with the contagious dots with which she filled everything, her pumpkins and her infinity rooms full of mirrors, disco balls, tentacles, and many more dots where those who enter multiply their images and merge through endless reflections with what surrounds them, as Kusama wanted, who always defended the self-dissolution of the ego and wanted to create a world without beginning or end. And she did so through obsessive repetition and multiplication of a single motif, bringing the psychedelia of the sixties to the public to create a trance and make them feel part of the whole.
The director of the Stedelijk Museum, Rein Wolfs, points out that it will be “one of the last major exhibitions in which Kusama was personally involved.” The curator of the exhibition – carried out with the Beyeler Foundation of Basel and the Ludwig Museum of Cologne – Leontine Coelewij, notes “that Kusama is an artist people think they already know” and they wanted to look beyond. To explore her art by strongly looking at her roots, beginnings in which, like in the big bang, everything was already there.
The exhibition displays childhood drawings in which Kusama, who suffered hallucinations, captures her later universe
“She was born in Matsumoto in 1929. From a very young age, drawing was an important part of her life. In some of her earliest works, there are already motifs that would accompany her: dots and patterns, but also flowers and pumpkins. For Kusama, a dot is never simply a dot; a dot becomes part of a pattern, and that pattern can extend until the individual form almost disappears within something much larger. That relationship between the individual and the world is one of the ideas that runs through her work,” concludes the curator, who recalls how when Kusama moved to the US “she entered an art world mostly dominated by men and, as a young Japanese woman, had to claim a position with extraordinary determination and develop a visual language entirely her own.”
The exhibition is an exceptional journey through a life. In it, there is a drawing made at ten years old in which the typical house children paint with the family outside is here colored in fuchsia, violet, red, and blue tones and the entire sheet is covered with dots everywhere, sky, house, people, like measles. As a child, Kusama was pursued by anxiety and hallucinations, she heard animals and plants talking to her and had visions with patterns of flowers, nets, and dots spreading through space and covering her body. She drew them to control them.
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Born into a wealthy family that owned a seed nursery, she grew up surrounded by plants in all stages of the life cycle. She was 16 when the atomic bombs fell on Japan and the threat of violence and death would be reflected in her works. In one of her first self-portraits, at 21, she merges the face and a flower, already showing her desire to abandon her identity: “Dissolving the individual self, one reaches the infinite universe.” She would manage to attend the Kyoto art academy despite her parents’ opposition and by the early 50s she was already recognized in Japan with her floral motifs, cellular shapes, and patterns of dots and nets. Georgia O’Keeffe encouraged her to go to the US in 1957 after destroying much of her work to renew herself.
The view of the immense ocean from the plane made her begin her paintings of infinite nets and amid the violent brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, she burst forth with beautiful paintings of nets made with small and patient brushstrokes, pioneers of minimalism. She evolved quickly and in the early sixties began to completely cover everyday objects, clothes, shoes, furniture, and even boats, with phallic shapes made of fabric and stuffed, sometimes painted white or silver, reflecting her struggle with anxiety and desire and found them liberating. In ’68 she created costumes with circular holes in erogenous zones and tunics painted with her net patterns for her happenings and her designs soon entered the fashion world: in 1969 she founded Kusama Fashion Incorporated, with a boutique in New York. Her happenings are legendary, her Body festivals, in which she painted dots on naked participants, became increasingly political and she took them to the streets to denounce capitalism, sexual oppression, and Vietnam.
A moment of enormous activity that ends abruptly: in 1973, after the death of the artist Joseph Cornell, to whom she was very close, and her father, hallucinations and depression returned her to Japan, where in 1977 she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. In the 80s, she returned to painting and sculpture, with motifs evoking nature or reproductive organs, and with many pumpkins, which fascinated her since childhood. Of course, the exhibition ends with an infinity room… inside another. In the smaller one, at times, the reflections in the mirrors among the yellow tentacles full of dots take the viewer to an intimate space where, at the same time, it seems to open to something beyond.
