By OGP Reporters (The source comes from Art Gallery of Ontario) / Members Contribute File Photos
Oh Good Party
Yayoi Kusama is arguably the most important living female artist in the world and her work is highly prized by collectors and institutions alike. On all fronts, Kusama has a formidable urge toward art and fame fueled by what seems to be a steely will and also a great mental focus — She has characterized art as her chance for salvation both here and in the afterlife. These mirror-lined installations reflect endlessly, distorting rooms to project the illusion of infinite space. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. It is the best-known and most spectacular series of Yayoi Kusama.
“Why Yayoi Kusama?” We asked a young collector couple. The visual and the emotional merged them, who bought the highest-quality artwork they could afford at the time. Without hesitation, they said something along the lines of, “She does her own thing and waited for the world to come to her. She created provocative work for the time, it was easier for her to be noticed.”
While it’s no secret that the list of the most expensive artists at auction is heavily dominated by males, some female artists have nonetheless been gaining serious ground in recent years. This is especially true for Yayoi Kusama.
Yayoi Kusama, born March 22, 1929, is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Today Yayoi Kusama still craves attention and dresses to remain unforgettable, wearing bright red wigs, outfits covered with polka dots, and goes about in a polka-dot encrusted wheelchair. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan .
To Toronto, this is a rare opportunity to celebrate a living artist whose radical yet playful vision has had an amazing influence on art, design and contemporary culture throughout her decades of work. We can find there are dots covering the Toronto downtown, some TTC streetcars and subway stations, and they’re all over social media feeds across the city. That’s because the highly-anticipated Yayoi Kusama —— Infinity Mirrors has begun at the AGO (Dates: March 3 - May 27, 2018).
Yayoi Kusama is arguably the most important living female artist in the world and her work is highly prized by collectors and institutions alike. On all fronts, Kusama has a formidable urge toward art and fame fueled by what seems to be a steely will and also a great mental focus — She has characterized art as her chance for salvation both here and in the afterlife. These mirror-lined installations reflect endlessly, distorting rooms to project the illusion of infinite space. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. It is the best-known and most spectacular series of Yayoi Kusama.
Infinity Mirrors provides visitors with the unique opportunity to experience six of Kusama’s most iconic kaleidoscopic environments at once, alongside large-scale, whimsical installations and key paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the early 1950s to the present. These include Phalli’s Field (1965/2016), a dense and dizzying field of hundreds of red-spotted phallic tubers in a room lined with mirrors; Love Forever (1966/1995), a hexagonal chamber into which viewers will be able to peer from the outside, seeing colored flashing lights that reflect endlessly from ceiling to floor; Kusama’s signature bold polka dots will be featured in Dots Obsession—Love Transformed into Dots (2009), a domed mirror room surrounded by inflatables suspended from the ceiling; More recent spectacular LED environments, filled with lanterns or crystalline balls that seem to extend into infinite space, will be represented by Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009) and Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013); The Obliteration Room (2002), an all-white replica of a traditional domestic setting. Upon entering, visitors will be invited to cover every surface of the furnished gallery with multicolored polka dot stickers, gradually engulfing the entire space in pulsating color.
And more than 60 paintings, sculptures and works on paper. A showcasing many of Kusama’s lesser-known collages, made after her return to Japan in 1973. These works trace the artist’s trajectory from her early surrealist works on paper, Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation assemblages to recent paintings and soft sculptures, highlighting recurring themes of nature and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, unity and isolation, obsession and detachment, and life and death. Over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities within the various contexts they have inhabited, from Kusama's “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present.
We think Yayoi Kusama might be the greatest artist to come out of the 1960s and one of the few, thanks in part to her long life, still making work that feels of the moment. She’s a bit of a charlatan who produces more Kusama paintings than the world needs and stoops to conquer with mirrored “Infinity” rooms with their fluctuating rhythms and imaginative images. She and her art run the gamut from avant-garde to popular to outsider to whiz-bang conjuring. Throughout the show, we see how Kusama uses her signature motif of polka dots —— which she uses to cover canvases, everyday objects, even herself and others —— as a way to show how everything and everyone in the world is connected. Her famous Infinity Mirror Rooms are the epitome of that idea, as anyone who steps inside them immediately becomes part of the artwork, repeating on and on into infinity.
Yayoi Kusama has received many awards, including the Asahi Prize (2001); Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003); the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun (2006); and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art. In October 2006, Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's highest honors for internationally recognized artists. She also received the Person of Cultural Merit (2009) and Ango awards (2014). In 2014, Kusama was ranked the most popular artist of the year after a record-breaking number of visitors flooded her Latin American tour, Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession. Venues from Buenos Aires to Mexico City received over 8,500 visitors each day. Kusama's work is in the collections of museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
