Yayoi Kusama

Infinity Nets 2000

Acrylic on Canvas

28.6 x 23.9 in.

Yayoi is a Japanese artist and writer whose work includes painting, sculpture, installations and performance art. The underlying theme in her oeuvre can be seen to stem from her interest in pattern and colour: rendered almost psychedelic in their intensity and repetition. Kusama is acknowledged as one of most prominent Japanese artists and is classified as an integral voice in the avant-garde movement.

Major retrospectives of her work have been shown at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in the states and at the Tate Modern in London. She has exhibited alongside world-renowned artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Jones, Lucio Fontana and her shows have been positively reviewed by various acclaimed critics including Frank Stella and Donald Judd. She represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and has since exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo amongst others.

Her works are inherently inspired by the hallucinations she is said to have experienced as a child. Her vivid, out-of-body depictions reflect her need to evoke this sense of paranoia and imagination in her work. The large-scale canvases, using watercolours, oils and pastels, are exterior reflections of her inner thoughts: ‘A lot of artists have to draw first with pencil, but I paint directly. Many people ask me, 'How do you draw that?’ and I just say, 'Ask my hand!’. In fact, Kusama sought after a kind of obliteration: both of the restraints of her native society and from the constraints of dimension and form. Her work challenges pre-conception and, in its profusion, manages to do so on multiple and wide span levels and interpretations.