Yayoi Kusama's fifty years of obsession

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s eccentric and psychedelic creations are instantly recognisable thanks to her signature motifs of dots, mirrors and overtly phallic objects that she uses to explore themes of sexuality, self-image and infinity. "My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots," she once said. Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, was the subject of a major retrospective in 1998-1999 which toured the US and Japan, and now, still working as hard as ever at 82-years-old, she is the subject of another major show dedicated to her 50-year career which opens today at the Pompidou Centre, Paris and runs until January 9.

The exhibition will take the viewer on a mind-altering chronological journey through 150 flamboyant pieces and begins with her early years in New York (she moved out there at aged 27) where she hung out with the ultimate avant-garde crowd of the 60s (her friends included the likes of minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and pioneer of ‘assemblage’ art – Joseph Cornell).

In NYC she organised an array of performances or Happenings - often involving high levels of nudity in public places such as her Anatomic Explosion series - made huge polka dotted canvases or Infinity Nets, and produced her Accumulations series which consist of hundreds of her signature phallic-looking protrusions that cover the surface of floors, the interior of boats, table tops and walls (Accumulation No. 1 1962, see image below).

Yayoi Kusama 'Accumulation No. 1' (1962)

Kusama’s creations are a direct result of her precarious psychological state, an illness the artist refers to ‘obsessional neurosis.’ She began having hallucinations as a child and currently lives out of choice in a psychiatric ward in her native country. The artist herself has said of her work - “It arises from a deep, driving compulsion to realise in visible form the repetitive image inside of me.”

She returned to Japan in 1973 (rather the worse for wear, by all accounts) after 17 years in the hub of the New York art scene and continued to produce large volumes of large-scale work including Environements which occupy entire rooms and use mirrors and reflections to create an infinite world of polka dots in Dots Obsession, Infinity Mirrored Room, 1998 (main image).

After its time in Paris, reworked versions of the show will travel to the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Tate Modern, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - plenty of time to check out an obsessive body of work that makes for seriously compulsive viewing.

Read more about Yayoi Kusama:

Kusama: 'I promised myself I'd conquer the world'

The fantastical world of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama designs London tube map

To infinity and beyond with Yayoi Kusama

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