Yayoi Kusama
February 9 – June 5 2012
If you aren't aware of Yayoi Kusama You can now see a major exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural
Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in
which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style.
Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an
astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture,
film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on
paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known
as "Accumulations", to her "Infinity Net" paintings, made up of
carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since
1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much
of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape
from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she
creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged
vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.
At
the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with
artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her
identity as an "outsider" in many contexts - as a female artist in a
male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world,
and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After
achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and
events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most
prominent contemporary artist.
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