Yayoi Kusama Yellow Dots B

cm 69 x 61 x 10

Yayoi Kusama, who in 2006 became the first woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan’s most prestigious awards for internationally renowned artists, is recognized as a precursor of important trends in art, such as Pop Art, Minimalism, and Feminist Art. After studying Nihonga, a formally rigorous style of Japanese painting, Kusama moved to New York at the end of the 1950s, attracted by the American art scene. Her first works dealing with the accumulation and repetition of forms date to this period (Infinity Net, Accumulatium, Sex Obsession), and it is a strand of inquiry she still pursues today. Her work embraces various media – painting, collage, sculpture, fabric, performance, and installation – and has involved important collaborations with the fashion and design world. A model of all-over forms is also central to "Yellow Dots B", consisting of a surface covered with Kusama’s typical nets, a kind of pattern of large and small polka dots inspired by the hallucinations the artist suffered from during her adolescence, when she saw everything covered with such motifs. The work displays an interest, which is specific to this artist, in constructing spaces and surfaces by way of proliferating forms, colors, and by tricks of perspective.

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Yayoi Kusama: I Want to Live Forever, exhibition catalogue (Milan, PAC-Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea), Milan 2009. L. Neri, T. Goto (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, New York 2012. Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2015.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Painting