The Infinite & the Sublime....Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is now entering her ninth decade. The artist has pioneered a career that has spanned a good six of those. Her creative journey - from her native Japan, to New York, where she became a darling at the forefront of the flourishing Pop Art movement - is well-charted and has become part of the legend surrounding this vibrant, prolific and visceral artist.
She has variously been lauded as the most successful, most popular, highest earning and most influential female artist in the world. Her work is oxymoronically personal and universal. Jealously discrete to her individuality yet instinctively understood by all who view it.
The bold, colourful and graphic repeating patterns comprised of dots and semi-circles, which have formed Kusama’s unfinished Infinity Nets series, are explained as representations of some of the vivid visual and auditory hallucinations the artist has experienced since childhood. Symptoms of a disorder which would eventually lead her, in 1977, to voluntarily check into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she remains a resident to this day.
The exhibition spans the galleries’ three locations across London. Victoria Miro gallery in London’s N1 postcode is host to Kusama’s newest Infinity Net paintings, sculptures and mirror rooms. In the peaceful waterside garden of the gallery’s terrace, the shiny, mirrored orbs of Narcissus Garden float in the canal. The ‘kinetic carpet’ of spheres is a permanent installation at the gallery and was originally shown at the Venice Biennale in the 1960s, where Kusama sold the individual spheres under a sign reading: ‘Your narcissism for sale’.
Her new paintings continue to examine the infinite and the sublime - obsessions which have preoccupied Kusama throughout her lifetime. Through the lens of her hallucinations, they can be seen distilled within her surreal and instinctive approach to art making.
The rest of this feature can be accessed in After Nyne 10. Available from the After Nyne Store priced at £8.99 plus P&P or from selected retailers.
