According to those-in-the-know, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is arguably Japan’s most famous living artist.
Her originality, innovation and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades.
And I’m a massive fan!
Over the years, Kusama has explored painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, as well as product design. Oooh and what about those ‘Happenings‘! She is really out there and I love her work! From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations there.
She became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan’s most prestigious prizes for internationally recognized artists. Now 84 years young, she is considered Japan’s foremost modernist.
She returned to Japan in her forties, where she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has only recently achieved. She continues to work, making art, and continuing to extend the range of her large-scale, dazzling installations as she relentlessly hand-paints extensive series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings.
Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum (NYC), and the Tate Modern (London), and even here in Australia at the Queensland Art Gallery.
In 2008, one of her works was sold for $5.1 million in Christies New York, a record for a living female artist.
Three of her most widely imitated works are the soft sculpture (now credited to Oldenburg); the mirror room (credited to Lucas Samaras); and the repeat image (credited to Warhol). An important voice of the avant-garde, she has been acknowledged as a precursor of Pop Art, Minimalism and Feminist Art.
Yayoi Kusama has spoken about her difficult childhood, “My mother was a shrewd businesswoman… but she was extremely violent,” she relates. “She hated to see me painting, so she destroyed the canvases I was working on. She beat me and kicked me on the derrière every day, irritated that I was always painting. She forced me to help the employees even when I had to study for my term exam. I was so exhausted that I felt very insecure at times.”
It didnt help that her siblings were also against her painting, telling her to be a collector rather than a painter. “I went to Kyoto simply to flee from my mother’s violence,” she said. “Because she was so vehemently against my becoming an artist, I became emotionally unstable and suffered a nervous breakdown. It was around this time, or in my later teens, that I began to receive psychiatric treatment.”
I came across Yayoi Kusama, when I saw her delightful work in a book. Kusama is quoted as saying “I am the modern Alice in Wonderland”.
I just had to have that book in my shop!
Here are some pictures of her stunning and fantastical illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a hard-backed, dazzling version of the book, available to buy here at Pure-Li Marketplace.
According to the book publishers, since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at their most creative, to see things the way children do, a central concern of the Alice books.
The classic book is colour illustrated with a clothbound jacket, and produced to very high specification. Kusama’s images are interspersed throughout the text. It is produced in collaboration with the Kusama Studio, Tokyo and Gagosian Gallery.
HATE POLKA DOTS?
Oh come on … wouldn’t you just love some of the Princess’s polka dots around your home?!
Hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Yayoi!
Love Liloi, xo