One of the most influential artists to emerge from postwar Japan, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) has produced a powerful body of work that includes drawing, painting, and sculpture, as well as some of contemporary art’s first environmental installations and performance works.  Much of her work is characterized by a formal and personal impulse toward repetition and accumulation.  Plagued by mental illness since childhood, she has suffered hallucinations and an obsession with certain images, which Kusama has turned into a highly personal visual language applied to painted surfaces and realized in sculptural objects.  Born in Japan, Kusama moved to New York in 1958 and lived there for fifteen years.  She now resides in Tokyo where she has voluntarily established permanent residence at a psychiatric hospital.

Kusama produced her first “Infinity Nets” in 1959.  Based on hallucinatory visions, these monumental canvases are painted in an obsessive all-over pattern of tiny circular marks.  The process of repetition is also apparent in her “Accumulation” sculptures, begun in the early 1960s.  These psycho-sexual objects include domestic items such as ironing boards, as well as mini-dresses and high-heeled shoes, that are covered with upholstered phallic forms.  In the late 1960s, Kusama directed a series of Happenings staged in New York City parks or at iconic sites.  Many of her installations are mirrored rooms into which the viewer is invited to walk. In some of these, light flashes rhythmically to music.  Since the 1980s, Kusama has returned to images of the net, polka dot, and phallus to create a body of work that has been remarkably consistent.

Although Kusama has been the subject of many exhibitions internationally, this exhibition will be the first retrospective in the United States in nearly twenty years.  Curated by Helaine Posner, AFA Adjunct Curator, it will be a comprehensive examination of more than fifty years of work, including a selection of the artist's “Infinity Net” paintings and “Accumulation” sculpture dating from the late 1950s and early 1960s; film and photographic documentation of her Happenings of the 1960s; drawings and collages; and large-scale paintings and sculpture from the 1970's to the present. Several of the artist's major installations, fromthe 1960s and the 1990s-2000s, will also be exhibited or reconstructed. The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue including an essay by Posner surveying Kusama’s work, as well as additional contributions.

Yayoi Kusama: An Odyssey will travel to four venues.

*This is when the tour is expected to begin. The exact date will depend upon the needs of the participating institutions. 

For more information contact Curator of Exhibitions Suzanne Ramljak at 212.988.7700 ext. 236 or sramljak@afaweb.org. You may also contact Theo Walther, Curatorial Assistant, at 212.988.7700 ext. 216 or twalther@afaweb.org.