Yayoi Kusama

A titan of the art world, Yayoi Kusama defies definition. Over seven decades, she's woven Pop Art, Minimalism, psychedelia, and popular culture into a singular artistic vision that continues to push boundaries.

Biography of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929, in Matsumoto, Nagano. She started drawing pictures of pumpkins in elementary school and created art inspired by her hallucinations. Kusama had a strained relationship with her mother, who did not support her artistic pursuits and treated her abusively. Yayoi Kusama's traumatic childhood, marked by her fantastic visions, can be considered the origin of her unique artistic style.

At the age of ten, Kusama began experiencing vivid hallucinations, such as flowers that spoke to her and patterns in fabric that came to life, multiplied, and engulfed or expelled her. These experiences profoundly influenced her art. Kusama's artwork became an escape from both her troubled family life and her own mind.

At thirteen, she was sent to work in a military factory, sewing and fabricating parachutes for the Japanese army. The events of the war deeply impacted her, and it was during this time that she began to value the notions of personal and creative freedom.

In 1948, she enrolled in the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts to study Nihonga painting. However, she grew frustrated with this traditional Japanese style and developed an interest in the European and American avant-garde movements.

By 1950, Kusama was creating abstract natural forms using watercolor, gouache, and oil paint, primarily on paper. She began covering various surfaces—walls, floors, canvases, household objects, and even naked assistants—with the polka dots that would become her trademark. The earliest recorded work featuring her signature dots was created in 1939 when she was just 10 years old. This drawing depicted a Japanese woman in a kimono, believed to be Kusama's mother, covered and obliterated by spots.

After living in Tokyo and France, Kusama left Japan for the United States at the age of 27, destroying many of her early works before her departure. In 1957, she moved to Seattle and held an exhibition at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery. After a year, she relocated to New York City. By 1961, she had moved her studio into the same building as Donald Judd and sculptor Eva Hesse, who became a close friend.

In the early 1960s, Kusama began creating soft sculptures by covering objects like ladders, shoes, and chairs with white phallic protrusions. Her style evolved to include repetitive mark-making and organic patterns on canvas, later expanding to environmental creations. By the mid-1960s in New York, she established herself as a pioneering avant-garde artist, staging groundbreaking performances, events, and exhibitions.

During this prolific period, Kusama experimented with room-sized installations incorporating mirrors, lights, and piped-in music. She counted Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell among her friends and supporters. Despite her success, she did not profit financially from her work and was frequently hospitalized due to overwork. Georgia O'Keeffe persuaded her dealer to purchase several of Kusama's works to alleviate her financial difficulties. Frustrated by her lack of financial success, Kusama's distress became so severe that she attempted suicide.

In the 1960s, Kusama organized provocative happenings in prominent locations such as Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often featuring nudity and aimed at protesting the Vietnam War. In 1966, she made her debut at the Venice Biennale during its 33rd edition.

In 1973, the artist returned to Japan, where she was met with an unsympathetic reception from the Japanese art world and press. One art collector even referred to her as a "scandal queen." Despite her ill health, she continued to work.

Her depression became so severe that she was unable to work and attempted suicide again. In 1977, she found a doctor using art therapy to treat mental illness in a hospital setting. Kusama checked herself into the hospital and eventually made it her permanent residence by choice. Her studio, located a short distance from the hospital in Tokyo, has been her workspace since the mid-1970s.

From this base, she has continued to produce artworks in a variety of media and launched a literary career, publishing several novels, a poetry collection, and an autobiography. Her painting style shifted to high-colored acrylics on canvas, executed on an amplified scale.

Kusama's return to Japan required her to rebuild her career from scratch. Her organically abstract paintings, often featuring one or two colors, had previously drawn comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. However, upon leaving New York, she was nearly forgotten as an artist until the late 1980s and 1990s, when a series of retrospectives reignited international interest in her work.

After the Japanese pavilion's success at the Venice Biennale in 1993, Kusama created a large yellow pumpkin sculpture adorned with a striking optical pattern of black spots. This pumpkin came to symbolize for her a sort of alter-ego or self-portrait. Despite entering her ninth decade, Kusama persisted as an artist, revisiting drawing and painting reminiscent of her earlier works. Her art continued to be innovative and multidisciplinary, with a notable 2012 exhibition showcasing numerous acrylic-on-canvas pieces.

During 2015–2016, the inaugural retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia toured four prominent museums in the region. This extensive show featured over 100 objects, including large-scale mirror room installations, and unveiled several early works that had not been publicly displayed since their inception.

In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum was opened in Tokyo.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami is currently hosting Yayoi Kusama's latest exhibition in South Florida. "LOVE IS CALLING" will be open to the public and available for viewing through 2024.