Yayoi Kusama
09 February - 05 June 2012
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| Yayoi Kusama
The Passing Winter, 2005 (detail)
© Tate. Presented by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2008. Photo: Tate Photography |
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YAYOI KUSAMA
9 February – 5 June 2012
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.
This is a varied, spectacular exhibition of a truly unique artist. There
has never been an exhibition of this size of her work in the UK and
this is an unmissable opportunity for both Kusama fans and those new to
her work.
www.tate.org.uk/modern
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