Yayoi Kusama set out from Japan as a young woman with the unbreakable will to carve out a place for her art on the world stage. Her unique approach, brought forth by her life-long battle with mental illness, visually translates into an obsession with recurring themes of Polka Dots, Nets and the Pumpkin motif.
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most visionary and influential artists of the contemporary era, celebrated for her pioneering contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and literary art. After relocating to New York City in the late 1950s, Kusama established herself within the avant-garde scene, but struggled to find galleries to promote and exhibit her art. Even though her years in New York were often full of hardship and despair, she went through an extremely productive phase as an artist. Kusama obsessively worked on her large-scale Net paintings and was the first artist to show Soft Sculptures and Mirror Rooms. Inserting her art with an unauthorized installation - Narcissus' Garden - into the 1966 Venice Biennale, was only one of Kusama's incredibly bold desicions and a pivotal piont in her work. Feeling that other artists of the predominantly male art scene in New York City took credit for her ideas, Kusama battled depression and ultimately moved back to Japan in 1973. After returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama worked prolifically but was largely unrecognized internationally until the late 1980s. Renewed attention came with key retrospectives, including her 1989 New York solo show, leading to major exhibitions in the West and her representation of Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale with the Infinity Mirror Room (Pumpkin). Since then, her work has been shown in major retrospectives and exhibitions worldwide, establishing her as one of the most famous and influential contemporary artists. Yayoi Kusama's lifelong inquiry into infinity, self-obliteration, and the psychological boundaries between self and environment continues, the artist lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.