Laura Hoptman

Yayoi Kusama has been obsessively and nearly incessantly creating artwork since the 1950s. The Japanese artist exhibited her first signature "Infinity Net" painting--a large canvas covered with a hypnotic array of little dots--in New York City in 1959. Since then she's shown her work the world over. Kusama's long career has overlapped the surrealist, expressionist, and pop-art movements, to name just a few, and though she has drawn inspiration from some of these sources, she has remained steadfastly focused on her own artistic vision. Her collections of wriggling, overstuffed spongy tubes overtaking floors, pieces of furniture, and rowboats; the polka dots covering her Infinity Net paintings, mirrored rooms, mannequins, and even her own skin; the mottled, gourdlike sculptures she installs in mirrored rooms--all of these visual motifs recur consistently in her work and evoke both Western and Eastern aesthetic influences.

(Abstract from Jordana Moskowitz)… (más)

We purchased while at the Benessee House, Naoshima, Japan.

When you walk toward the Benessee "Art Project" area: The installation, Pumpkin, Yayoi Kusama's iconic sculpture on Naoshima, an island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea is a popular area for tourists & visitors to take photos. Her yellow pumpkin, dotted in black, has become somehow the icon of Naoshima, the Japanese island transformed in a cradle of modern and contemporary art.

As other reviewers have said, this book has a general description of Kusama's works, her background, and where her work milieu stands in the world of modern art.… (más)