HIGHLIGHTS

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1929 to a merchant family that owned a seed business. She was surrounded by flowers in her childhood and sketching was a daily routine. Though her powers of observation were exceptional and she excelled at drawing, her childhood was that of a typical young girl. Kusama, however, realized from an early age that her sensibility was different from those around her. Her art was her way of struggling against hallucinations that plagued her psyche, and the images of her mind eventually became her armor on the world stage.
At the age of 28, in 1957, Kusama went on her own to the United States. She spent around 16 years there, mainly in New York, and became established with her signature net and polka dot images. In 1973, suffering physical and mental exhaustion, she returned to Japan. Many of her works from this time reflect her agony and evoke visions of "death."
It is also around this time that she began to produce prints with vibrant motifs and color, diametrically opposed to her previous works focused on suffering and death. The coexistence of these two trends is testament to the flexibility of Kusama's expressive method. At the same time, it suggests the inner conflict that enabled (or forced) her to oscillate between the two extremes.

Kusama's striking debut in the United States came in 1959 with her Infinity Nets series, canvases entirely covered in painted mesh nets. Sex and food began to appear as themes around 1962 when she started developing as a sculptor, producing soft sculptures with cotton filled protrusions affixed to ready-made objects. In 1963, she expanded into spatial art, placing a boat covered with fabric protrusions in the center of a room and surrounding it with posters of the work, making the room itself an artwork. Around 1965, Kusama began using decorative lights and mirrors to create three-dimensional sculptures. Mirror Room is a typical example of this kind of light sculpture. By means of mirrors, lights (polka dots) flicker and repeat endlessly, in a kind of eternal image accumulation Kusama presents to viewers.
This sparkling world is also present in Kusama's prints. Her Infinity Nets represent a very concentrated and extremely simplified rendering of her accumulated mental and visual experiences. These works also encapsulate her memories of murmuring streams in Matsumoto and Pacific Ocean ripples she viewed from her airplane window. Glitter particles in her prints may also be connected to such memories.

Kusama grew up surrounded by plants and spent her childhood sketching in the fields around her home. The pumpkin was a particular favorite. She was attracted to its endearing plump form and she sketched pumpkins over and over again. Her polka dot and mesh net patterns were connected to memories of the plants of her childhood and, over time, sublimations of her inner conflicts. The polka dots on her familiar pumpkin motifs help viewers relate to Kusama's expression, making the pumpkin the reigning image of Kusama's art.

Covering her canvases, sculptures, and entire spaces with repeating patterns of polka dots and mesh, Kusama clearly demonstrated the infinite nature of her internal visions.
Through her art, Kusama expressed her individuality and sublimated the disturbing images that haunted her since childhood. Her success in doing this came from a long and difficult struggle with her conflicts and through analysis. She adopted techniques and materials available to her that allowed her to express the painful images without stop. She continues like this in the avant-garde to this day. Given her creative activity rooted in image repetition, reproduction in printmaking seems an inevitable outcome. With prints, images that had been done by hand could proliferate.

Kusama's works presented in this section are all etchings. Unlike silkscreen or lithograph prints produced by a printer from original drawings, Kusama's etchings are created by her direct inscription of lines on copper plate. In the printed etchings, every nuance of Kusama's touch and engraving is revealed. The monochromatic expression makes Kusama's etchings all the more powerful.
In retrospect, monochrome works have appeared at major turning points in Kusama's art. For example, both her Infinity Nets that appeared following her arrival in the United States and her soft sculptures that initiated the beginning of her sculptural works were first done in white. When embarking on a new area of expression, Kusama first explores shape, and color follows after that. Form acts as a foundation that allows Kusama free reign with color.

The Love Forever silkscreen series was created over a four year period, starting in 2004. In total, there are 50 original drawings done with black marker pen on canvases measuring 162x130 cm. These drawings with concrete motifs of faces, eyes, and organic forms depart from Kusama's previous works defined by canvases, sculptures, and installations replete with polka dots and mesh nets. They speak to the profound depth of Kusama's art.
The simple polka dot and mesh net patterns provided Kusama an arsenal to express herself as her spiritual world expanded through self-analysis. With Love Forever, she moved in a different direction, rooted in images of the Matsumoto flower gardens in her mind since childhood. Such recollections may have been suppressed when she was in New York and polka dots and nets were her armor. The Love Forever series brings memories embedded in her earlier prints to the surface at the time she returned to Japan.
Kusama's My Eternal Soul series of acrylic paintings followed her Love Forever series and marked the starting point of her recent breakthrough that continues to develop now in her latest series Every Day I Pray for Love.