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Yayoi Kusama

Japanese

1929, Matsumoto, Japan

Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Yusuke Miyazaki © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, Ota Fine Arts, and Victoria Miro
Biography

Yayoi Kusama is one of the world’s most iconic and celebrated artists working today. With connections to Pop Art, Minimalism, psychedelia and popular culture, Kusama’s multidisciplinary career transcends categories as the artist continues to innovate over a career spanning more than 70 years. Kusama’s artistic practice encompasses paintings, sculpture, installations, works on paper, performances, films, fashion, design, and literary works. Her work across this wide breadth of media alludes to both microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama began her artistic education at the Kyoto City Senior High School of Art. Early in her artistic career, she had several solo exhibitions in Japan before moving to New York in 1958. She developed a style that embraced repetitive mark-making and organic patterns and forms on canvas, expanding to environmental creations after 1962. In the mid-1960s in New York, she established herself as a pioneering avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking performances, events and exhibitions. She moved back to Japan in 1973 where she lives and works in Tokyo. Her work gained renewed widespread recognition in the late 1980s following several notable international solo exhibitions. She created her first mirrored environment in 1965, her first darkened Infinity Mirror Room in 2000, and has since constructed over 20 such installations that have become audience favorites worldwide. In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale, receiving much critical acclaim, and she began to create open-air sculptures in 1994.

Over the past 25 years, Kusama’s work has been featured in numerous major museum exhibitions around the world, including presentations at the ICA Boston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; National Gallery of Singapore; Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Qatar Museums, Doha; M+ Museum in Hong Kong and Guggenheim Bilbao Museum.

Works in the Collection

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