Yayoi Kusama — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 10, 2011 → January 9, 2012

Yayoi Kusama En choisissant de déployer un versant plus noir de l’artiste japonaise Yayoi Kusama, malade et prisonnière de ses hallucinations, l... 2 - Bien Critique

The Centre Pompidou is to stage the first French retrospective devoted to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929): through a chronological display of some 150 works dating from 1949 to 2011, the exhibition pays tribute to an artist who stands apart, in a class of her own, yet one who has had a considerable influence on contemporary art from Andy Warhol to Mike Kelley, and who still attracts the interest of the rising generation.

The exhibition then travels to the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Tate Modern, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Each city will however make a distinctive contribution to the whole, as the display will vary from place to place: the Centre Pompidou for its part will put distinctive emphasis on Kusama’s sculpture and the experiments with colour represented by her monochromes.

The exhibition maps the key points in the artists career, illustrating the protean nature (painting, sculpture, performance, environments…) of a body of work the artist herself describes as “obsessional.” This characteristic is strongly connected to a childhood memory, a hallucination that stands at the root of her recurrent motif of the dot. “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots,” she has said.

After an introductory section featuring her early, small-format works, notably a number of watercolours never yet seen in Europe, marked by a certain Surrealist influence, the exhibition falls into two major periods: exile in New York, and the return to Japan after 1973.