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.
Kusama Yayoi
Tate Modern
期間：9 February – 5 June 2012
住所：Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
E: visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
入場料：£10 (£8.50 concessions)
Web: Tate Modern
