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Nueva York<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
On arriving in New York in 1958, Kusama visited the Empire State Building and looked out from its observation deck over the bustling streets of Manhattan. It was then that she realised that, to be recognised in New York, she would need to do something truly spectacular. Her first impression of the city was of “a fierce and violent place,” an extremely stressful “hell.” Despite these conditions, she persevered, determined to make a name for herself at the centre of the art world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through a repetitive creative process, Kusama painted large canvases that immersed both artist and viewer in an expansive monochromatic field. From 1963, she extended her interest in self-immersion, or “self-obliteration,” into three dimensions. For her Accumulation<\/em> sculptures, Kusama covered furniture and found objects with phallus-like fabric forms, a sculptural style she would continue for decades to come.<\/p>\n\n\n In 1965 and 1966, Kusama presented her first infinity mirror rooms at the Castellane Gallery in New York. These installations, which immersed visitors in 360-degree reflections, brought Kusama a step closer to her ambition of losing herself in a space multiplying into infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n Kusama’s work underwent a major shift in the second half of the 1960s. Between 1967 and 1969, she staged around seventy-five happenings, events charged with social and political meaning tied to the countercultural movements of the time, such as protests for sexual liberation and against the Vietnam War. Most of Kusama’s happenings took place in prominent public spaces in New York, including Central Park, Trinity Church and the Brooklyn Bridge. Participants in these public interventions were usually nude, and Kusama \u2014 the self-proclaimed High Priestess of Polka Dots \u2014 used her brush to obliterate their bodies with dots.<\/p>\n\n\n Kusama regularly wore outfits she designed herself. Beyond her personal wardrobe, she made radical garments aligned with the spirit of the sexual liberation movement. To extend the reach of her fashion designs beyond the art world and make them commercially viable, she founded the Kusama Fashion Company in 1969. That same year she launched a ready-to-wear collection. Ranging from relatively conventional styles to radical designs, Kusama’s clothing was sold in New York stores and in her own boutique on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Eighth Street.<\/p>\n\n\n In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan after nearly sixteen years living in the United States. Around this time, she suffered the deaths of several important people in her life, including her father in 1974. A period of introspection and psychological crisis followed, leading her, in 1977, to choose to live with regular access to psychiatric care. She eventually established an independent studio, but for a time her working space was limited, prompting her to begin making small-scale collages. These detailed, intimate works combine cut-out photographs and illustrations, often featuring insect, marine or botanical motifs alongside her characteristic drawn and painted nets, webs and dots.<\/p>\n\n\n Kusama first saw a pumpkin as a primary school student visiting a seed nursery with her grandfather. Among vines of yellow flowers, she discovered a pumpkin the size of a man’s head and, as she went to pick it, it began speaking animatedly to her. Enchanted by its character, the young Kusama adopted the pumpkin as a recurring motif in her art. She painted her first pumpkin as a teenager, in 1946. She compared the ritual of painting pumpkins to Zen meditation: “I confronted the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else, and concentrated my whole mind on the form before me.”<\/p>\n\n\n In the late 1970s, Kusama returned to one of the most enriching and wonderful pursuits of her childhood. Having first painted pumpkins with yellow-and-black or white-and-black dots, she went on to perfect the pumpkin’s image across sculptures, infinity mirror rooms and a host of commercial products, elevating it into one of the most recognisable icons in contemporary art worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n In 1981 she was included in a major exhibition of contemporary Japanese art at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, cementing her place on the national art scene, but it was not long before she returned to the world stage. Her first international retrospective was held in 1989 at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, and in 1993 she became the first contemporary artist to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n\n\n In her work from the final decades of the twentieth century, the artist looked simultaneously to the past and to the future. Her soft botanical sculptures and repetitive multi-panel paintings recall her\u00a0Accumulations<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Infinity Nets<\/em>\u00a0of the 1950s and 60s, while also extending her artistic exploration of the natural and cosmic worlds. Kusama’s expanded vision took shape once again in\u00a0Dots Obsession<\/em>, 1996, an environment populated with polka-dot inflatables. The work has since been realised in many variations, incorporating mirrors from 1998 onward \u2014 an evolution of the artist’s revolutionary infinity mirror rooms of the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n Since 2000, Yayoi Kusama has become one of the most recognised artists in the world. From major international exhibitions and monumental sculptures installed in public spaces to the widespread recognition of her signature motifs and striking visual identity (above all, her red wig), Kusama became a key figure in popular culture. In 2016 she was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. In the twenty-first century, Kusama’s rise was amplified by the power of social media. Images of her infinity mirror rooms and her collaborations with luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton introduced her art to millions of people.<\/p>\n\n\n Despite her status, Kusama remained committed to a deeply personal art. Whether in poetry, painting, large-scale installations or infinity mirror rooms, Kusama expressed reasons for hope in the face of existential finitude. Her creativity was her lifeline.<\/p>\n\n\n In 2002, Kusama published her autobiography, in which she wrote: “What I think about above all is that I want to create good art. That is my only wish. It would be pointless and meaningless to dwell on the ever-shortening time I have left, or to think about my limitations. I will never stop striving to create works that shine after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart overflows with the aspiration to make art that will live forever.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kusama’s vision kept expanding, whether she was painting in solitude or developing new works, site-specific installations and mirror rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n This exhibition presented, for the first time, a new infinity mirror room alongside a selection of recent paintings created since 2021. Over this period, Kusama’s mobility had declined and her living space had become her workspace. As a result, the scale of her canvases grew smaller. These paintings are filled with imagery drawn from nature and childhood memories, as well as other ideas that had preoccupied the artist since her early years in Matsumoto. Kusama’s continuous, prolific output stands as testimony to her unwavering desire to create art.<\/p>\n\n\n Kusama’s kaleidoscopic world extended beyond the walls of the NGV, enveloping the trees along Melbourne’s iconic grand boulevard. Kusama first presented Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees<\/em> at the Kirishima Open-Air Museum in Japan in 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n Melbourne created a special iteration in a bold weave of pink and white polka dots. Nearby, the glass wall of NGV International was covered in a pink-and-black polka dot design that drew visitors into Kusama’s creative world through this iconic Melbourne entrance.<\/p>\n\n In Federation Court, visitors were able to discover an imposing five-metre-tall bronze pumpkin sculpture recently acquired by the NGV.\u00a0Dancing Pumpkin<\/em>\u00a0(2020), which twists beneath the skylight, is one of Kusama’s largest and most ambitious renderings of her beloved pumpkin motif to date. While her earlier pumpkin sculptures rest on static, solid bases,\u00a0Dancing Pumpkin<\/em>\u00a0has eleven leg-like sections, all but three of which float above the ground, suggesting joyful movement.<\/p>\n\n\n The exhibition also included the Australian premiere of\u00a0The Hope of the Polka-dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe<\/em>, 2019, which visually envelops viewers within six-metre-tall tentacular forms covered in yellow and black polka dots.<\/p>\n\n\n Also on display is\u00a0Narcissus Garden<\/em>, a new iteration of the installation Kusama first presented unofficially at the 1966 Venice Biennale. The installation comprises more than 1,400 stainless steel spheres, each 30 cm in diameter, presented en masse as visitors enter the Gallery. As the metallic spheres reflect one another, they create an infinitely recurring landscape that envelops the viewer \u2014 a reference to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who became so captivated by his own reflection in the water that he drowned in it.<\/p>\n\n\n Also on display in the Great Hall is\u00a0Dots Obsession<\/em>, originally conceived by the artist in 1996. This spectacular work, suspended above and below the Great Hall’s iconic stained-glass ceiling by Leonard French, features large inflatable yellow and black vinyl spheres covered in the artist’s signature polka-dot pattern. For Kusama, polka dots symbolise both the individual and the cosmos when presented in great numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n Also on display in the NGV’s free children’s gallery is\u00a0The Obliteration Room<\/em>\u00a0(2002\u2013present), a large-scale interactive installation that invites audiences of all ages to transform an all-white domestic interior into a kaleidoscope of coloured dots.<\/p>\n\n\n Throughout her career, Kusama used dots and other repetitive forms to cover different surfaces and fill entire rooms. Kusama called this process “obliteration,” a concept underpinning much of her work, which involves breaking something down in order to return it to the universe. In this work, Kusama invites children and their families to take part in this process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through rarely seen materials drawn from the artist’s own archive \u2014 including photographs, films, letters, magazines, posters and other ephemera \u2014 the exhibition highlighted the radical nature of Kusama’s performances, fashion designs and activism in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition revealed how Kusama’s psychedelic parties and events \u2014 known as happenings \u2014 became vehicles for exploring radical ideas such as sexual liberation. Experimental fashion designs, created by Kusama for the first time during this period, were also on display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Yayoi Kusama exhibition ran from 15 December to 21 April 2025 at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan. She began painting as a child to express hallucinations and escape a family dynamic marked by mistreatment and neglect. At the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, she studied Nihonga, a formal traditional style of Japanese painting. She moved to New York in 1958, inspired by the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the following decade, Kusama worked on her Infinity Nets series \u2014 paintings, soft sculptures, collages, films and installations featuring repetitive motifs and alluding to her hallucinations. In the 1960s, she staged happenings across New York City, one of which involved painting dots on nude participants. In 1973 she returned to Japan, and in 1977 she voluntarily moved into a psychiatric hospital, where she currently lives. After immersing herself in the world of poetry and short stories, she returned to making art featuring the iconic dots of her childhood visions, this time scattering the dots \u2014 which for her represent the moon and the sun, movement, and a path to infinity \u2014 throughout a room of mirrors. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, and in 2017 she opened the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout her prolific career, Kusama has continually explored themes of mental illness, repetition, obsession, creation, destruction, sex and feminism through her paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, films, poetry, and fashion and performance-based works. She has received numerous awards, and her work has been presented in numerous touring exhibitions and retrospectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Source: National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yayoi Kusama, the artist of the infinite polka dots, passed away on 14 August at the age of 97. We look back at her legacy through the exhibition the National Gallery of Victoria dedicated to her eight-decade career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70747,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","editor_plus_copied_stylings":"{}","footnotes":"","_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[742],"tags":[2465],"ppma_author":[249],"class_list":["post-70724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-yayoi-kusama"],"authors":[{"term_id":249,"user_id":1,"is_guest":0,"slug":"amoratinos","display_name":"Ex\u00e1gono","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/95418ef5af1f1a520d5386cfe82ba253c88665f94a4343ec69a36d8df034ab4b?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","first_name":"","last_name":"","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70724"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70748,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70724\/revisions\/70748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70724"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exagono.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=70724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/nueva-york.jpg\")
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Kusama and the Counterculture<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Kusama Fashion Company<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Return to Japan<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Pumpkins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Return to the World Stage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Kusama in the 21st Century<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Kusama Today<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/NGV-Yayoi-Kusama-Ascension-of-Polka-Dots-on-the-Trees.-Photo-Tobias-Titz-2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/NGV-Yayoi-Kusama-Ascension-of-Polka-Dots-on-the-Trees.-Photo-Tobias-Titz-4.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/NGV-Yayoi-Kusama-Ascension-of-Polka-Dots-on-the-Trees.-Photo-Tobias-Titz.jpg\")
Dancing Pumpkin<\/h2>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Hope of the polka dots buried in infinity will eternally cover the universo<\/h2>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nNarcissus Garden<\/h2>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDots Obsession<\/h2>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/459_RG_Timeline-1024x677.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Obliteration Room<\/h2>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/exagono.es\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/yayoi-IG.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nYayoi Kusama<\/h2>\n\n\n\n