Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots

by Tate
1594

Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots

 

The nine decades of artist 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 obsessive 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 art artist kusama yayoikusama painting polkadots dots contemporaryart happening newyork tokyo japan