Who is Yayoi Kusama?
He is one of the most important artists of our time, who has been dazzling the public with his immersive installations “Infinity Mirror Rooms” with an aesthetic that embraces light, polka dots and pumpkins. The avant-garde artist rose to prominence in 1960s New York, where she staged provocative Happenings and exhibited hallucinatory paintings of loops and dots that she called “Infinite Nets.” Kusama also influencedAndy Warholand foreshadowed the rise of feminist and pop art. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Center Pompidou, Tate Modern and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. Today, his work regularly sells for seven figures on the secondary market. Throughout the disparate practice, Kusama continued to explore her own obsessive-compulsive disorders, sexuality, freedom, and perception.
history of Yayoi Kusama
Kusama started painting as a child, around the time she started having hallucinations that often involved dot fields. The artist grew up in Matsumoto during Japan's expanding foreign policy in the 1940s, with Kusama's family working in a seed nursery. In 1948, at age 19, he moved to Kyoto to study the traditional style of nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. Later, he trained in the technique of yōga, a form of Japanese painting in a Western style associated with the rapid modernization of Japan.
Moving to the United States in the late 1950s, after being encouraged through letter correspondence with American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Before leaving Japan, the artist destroyed many of his early paintings. Kusama's reputation in Europe grew in the 1960s, her work being exhibited in Amsterdam, Milan, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Turin and Venice.Yayoi Kusama worked with numerous techniques such as painting, collage, sculpture, video, performance, installation, fashion, literature and music. Infinity Mirror Rooms and other large-scale installations, with dotted patterns covering surfaces with incessant repetition, aim to overwhelm the senses. Mirrors create dizzying spaces that duplicate our gaze.
How did Yayoi Kusama become so famous?
The most obvious answer is “Instagram”. Thousands of people photograph themselves in Kusama's unique space wonders and share on social media (see #YayoiKusama or #InfiniteKusama). Many contemporary art galleries are currently exploring the idea of exhibition as an “experience” on social media. It was with this idea, first created in New York in 1966, that the artist managed to conquer the market.
Yayoi Kusama no Tate
Yayoi Kusama's mirror rooms are some of the most popular works of art today, and this installation continues to sell out. But Tate knows that, so they've just extended the show through June 2023 and are releasing new tickets.There are two works featured: 'Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life', one of Kusama's largest installations, created specifically for her 2012 historical retrospective at Tate Modern, and 'Chandelier of Grief', a 2016 room that creates the illusion of a limitless universe of Swarovski crystal swivel lamps. Kusama, whose spotted pumpkins basically destroyed Instagram in 2016, started her 'Infinity' or 'Mirror Room' series in 1963, disorienting environments that play with notions of space and distance, as well as creative possibilities and her own sometimes troubled state of mind. Experiencing one of them is unforgettable. Tickets are free for Tate members, £10 for non-members and just £5 if you're under 25.
