Yayoi Kusama
IN INFINITY
Yayoi Kusama is a true singular figure in modern art, highly original and tremendously popular. The presentation of the Kusama's life's work at Louisiana was the first Scandinavian retrospective of her art. For the museum the exhibition also turned out to be a significant Louisiana event, as 340.721 guests visited Kusama's fascinating infinity universe. Hereby the exhibition became the third most visited exhibition in Louisiana's history.
Based in Tokyo, Kusama (b. 1929) has gained world fame in recent decades for her universe of brightly colored, sprawling patterns covering the surfaces of paintings and sculptures and spreading across entire rooms. In the center of this boundless visual universe stands Kusama herself, often wearing patterned clothes that make her blend in with her art.
The exhibition was a presentation of Kusama’s works from more than six decades and featured a variety of the many artistic media in which she has worked: from visual art to performance, film, literature and design. A special feature of this exhibition was the involvement of Kusama’s work with fashion and design including the artist’s earliest, unique fashion design from the 1960s. In addition to this the exhibition displayed a selection of Kusama’s youth works from Japan, which has never been exhibited before, examples of both her earliest and newer installation works and a new series of paintings, which the 86 year old Kusama created specifically for the exhibition at Louisiana.
The exhibition at Louisiana was supported by C. L. Davids Fond og Samling.
In 2016 the exhibition travels on to Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo, Norway, Moderna Museet/ArkDes, Stockholm, Sweden and HAM – Helsinki Art Museum, Finland. The Scandinavian tour is supported by Japan Foundation.
ON LOVE AND PEACE AND FASHION AND PUMPKINS...
In this new interview with the Louisiana Channel, recorded in her Tokyo Studio, 86-year old Kusama tells us about her longing for love and peace as fundamentally important to her life and work. She talks about the joy of fashion, her mission as an artist, the fight for a better world and her relationship to pumpkins ant their humurous, human forms. “I have the enthusiasm as if I were still a child,” she says.
POLKA DOT COSMOS
In this interview with Louisiana Channel Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama tells – and sings – about her life and her parents, who strongly opposed her artistic ambitions. You can also hear about her working process, in which she blocks out everything else, and about the work in the Louisiana Collection, Gleaming Lights of the Souls, in which she seeks a cosmic vision and sense of an infinity of polka dots.