Yayoi Kusama
“I WANT YOUR TEARS TO FLOW WITH THE WORDS I WROTE”
New York, 537 West 20th Street 2nd Floor
Kusama’s work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures.
In the late 2000s, Kusama began her ongoing My Eternal Soul paintings, which feature the signature allover qualities of her Infinity Nets and echo the obsessive, recurring geometries of her decades-long output. Conveying the extraordinary vitality that characterizes Kusama’s oeuvre, each composition is an innovative exploration of form, subject matter, and space, in which abstract and figurative elements combine to offer impressions of both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Initially as large as two meters square, the works have been intimately scaled down in recent years. These paintings are often installed in tightly spaced grids of varying sizes, and renew familiar motifs and symbols. They encompass a spirited palette of vibrant hues and pulse with dynamic lines and biomorphic shapes that recall eyes and human faces. Both reiterative and singularly expressive, these canvases hum with the disquiet that informs our daily lives as well as the self-reflexive gestures that steady the artist’s hand.
