Yayoi Kusama / Japan

Japan born 1929, worked in United States 1958–70s

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is one of the most celebrated living artists. With a career spanning more than sixty years, Kusama is recognised for her immersive installations that explore ideas of infinity and obliteration. Kusama’s obsessive patterning of polka dots and use of nets reference a series of aural and visual hallucinations that have haunted the artist for most of her life.

Commissioned for the NGV Triennial, Flower obsession, 2017, revisits the origins of Kusama’s art which she traces back to her childhood. As she describes, ‘One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern. I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated … This was not an illusion but reality itself’.

Flower obsession, 2017, recreates a furnished domestic space. Visitors are invited to apply red flower motifs to the walls, furniture and objects. Over the duration of the exhibition, the proliferation of flowers will gradually cover all surfaces, ‘obliterating’ and transforming the space into a spectacular environment.

BIO

Kusama’s work has been the subject of numerous institutional exhibitions, including a comprehensive retrospective which between 2011 to 2012 was presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2006 Kusama received Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, and in 2008 was presented with the order Person of Cultural Merits. In 2013 the artist was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Foreign Honorary Membership. The Yayoi Kusama Museum, founded by Kusama, opened in Tokyo in 2017.