Yayoi Kusama, Japan's most outstanding painter, sculptor and performance artist, an author of installations, videos and short stories, belongs to the same constellation of artists as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Rebecca Horn and Annette Messager. She has risen to fame on two separate occasions. This occurred initially during the 1960s in New York and Europe. Then once again, in the 1990s, as an artist advanced in years, she returned triumphantly to the Japanese and world art scenes, her success confirmed by a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998).
Yayoi Kusama's art has always been biographical and embodied deep psychological and sexual meanings. Polka dots and their opposite - a painted net that refers to negative space and the artist's negative experiences - have been some of the motifs of greatest importance to her work. The artist has used the dot motif both on the flat surfaces of her paintings, as well as in three-dimensional spaces. Phalluses representing sexual obsessions and the erotic dimension have been another recurring motif.
The system ordering Kusama's motif obsessions has, since 1959, been one of repetition and accumulation. Kusama contends that Warhol assumed the method of repeated elements from her own work after seeing her exhibition at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York (1963). The roots of these motifs, obsessions and systems of structuring her art and thinking lie in the artist's childhood. Her inspiration with dots dates back to Kusama's daydreams at the age of ten years, when she projected the patterns she noticed on real objects onto the objects' entire environments and her own body.
This exhibition at the "Zacheta" National Contemporary Art Gallery will present just a fragment of Kusama's abundant oeuvre and variety of motifs. It will consist of a selection of her paintings, drawings and collages and encompass pieces dating from the artist's entire creative career. Works on paper will range from Kusama's early creations that were both Surrealistic (LINGERING DREAM, 1949) and abstract (FLOWER, 1952), through compositions based on her system of accumulation (ACCUMULATION, 1952), to her later collages (FLOWERS AND SELF-PORTRAIT, 1973) and her newest paintings, invariably containing the same recurring motifs of dots and nets (INFINITY NETS, 1953, INFINITY DOTS, 1952, and INFINITY DOTS, 1998, NETS OBSESSION, 2003). The motif of the net also appears in RED HORIZON (1980), a work composed of linked gloves that have been painted red. The material of which the installation is made, the manner in which its elements have been linked to form a net and the system of accumulation evident in the work all first appeared much earlier, during the early stages of Kusama's creative career in New York.
Also on display will be the artist's early sculptures, dating from the 1960s and 1970s. These will include a mannequin, i.e. PHALLIC GIRL (1965), four panel paintings covered in stuffed forms symbolizing phalluses and titled A SIGN PORT TO HADES (1976) and objects titled SILVER NIGHT (1982), which include similar phallic forms. One of the most significant pieces in the exhibition will be REPETITIVE VISION, PHALLUS BOAT (2000), which belongs to the group of Kusama's works that manifest the same repeating objects, motifs and systems for ordering them. Various versions of these works can be identified in the artist's past achievements (an earlier version of the boat dates from 1963 and is included in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; a newer version, from 1994, can be found in the MoMA collection). The motifs that appear in them recur in Kusama's monumental flower titled DEATH OF ILLUSION (2000). One of the most singular installations in the exhibition will be NARCISSUS GARDEN (1966/2000), which was shown for the first time at the 23rd Venice Biennale (1966). This installation consists of approximately one thousand five hundred silver spheres, which, brought together (accumulated), simulate a reflecting surface, however, in this surface it is impossible to find a uniform, contiguous reflection.
By far the most important installations on view will include FIREFLIES ON THE WATER (2000), DOTS OBSESSION (1999) and CHANDELIER WITH PAIN (2002) - mirrored, infinite spaces that reflect their own interiors, one filled with small lights reflected in mirrors and pools of water, another with red balloons with white polka dots, the third containing a spinning, crystal chandelier.
The Matejko Room of the "Zacheta" Gallery will be devoted to the artist's video projects, which will be combined with the obsessively recurring motif of three large dots/circles. The room will be arranged in a style similar to Kusama's installations titled DOTS OBSESSION, for which she decorates encountered spaces with colorful dots that she combines with balloons. The presentation of videos will include the films "Kusama's Self Obliteration" (1967), "Flower Orgy" (1968), "Love in Festival" (1968), "Kusama's Room" (1999), "Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict" (1999), "Flower Obsession Gerbera" (1999) and "Flower Obsession Sunflower" (2000). This part of the display will also include a series of slides of Kusama in her WALKING PIECE (1966). The slides constitute documentation of a performance art piece for which the artist wandered the streets of New York in a kimono.
Kusama's versatility has meant that throughout her career she has spanned many different artistic realms. Her achievements have included an appearance in Ryu Murakami's film "Topaz," as well as joint projects with famous photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, musician Peter Gabriel and fashion designer Issey Miyake.
The works brought together for this exhibition derive from the collections of the Kusama Studio and Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, the Galerie Piece Unique in Paris, the Salomon Foundation in France, the Musee des Beaux Arts in Nancy, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, the Jork/Walter&Fabien Gallery in Lucerne and Le Consortium in Dijon. Yayoi Kusama's works can be found in some of the world's most significant contemporary art collections, including those of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).
Exhibition opening: April 6, 2004.
"Zacheta" National Gallery of Art
"Zacheta" Narodowa Galeria Sztuki w Warszawie
Plac Malachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warszawa
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