Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生, b. 22 March 1929, Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture) is one of the most internationally visible Japanese artists of the postwar period and the most commercially successful living woman artist worldwide. Across more than seventy years of working life she has produced an enormous and continuously expanding body of work spanning painting, sculpture, environmental installation (the 'Infinity Mirror Rooms'), performance, fiction, poetry, fashion, and an extensive practice of editioned printmaking. Her signature motifs — polka dots, pumpkins, infinity nets, biomorphic figures with eyes — recur across all media, organising a unified visual vocabulary that has become one of the most-recognised graphic signatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Kusama trained in nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, graduating in 1948. She corresponded in the early 1950s with the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who encouraged her to come to the United States; in 1957 Kusama moved to Seattle and then in 1958 to New York City, where she lived until her return to Japan in 1973. The New York period was decisive for her wider reputation: she developed the 'Infinity Net' paintings in 1959 (large fields of obsessive small white loops on coloured ground), produced the soft-sculpture 'Accumulations' (everyday objects covered in fabric phallic protrusions), staged a sequence of body-painting Happenings in the late 1960s, and engaged with the emergent New York scene alongside Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Joseph Cornell (with whom she had an intense relationship until his death), and Andy Warhol.

In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and in 1977 voluntarily entered the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where she has lived ever since while continuing to work daily in a studio across the street. The post-1977 phase of her career has been the most prolific by far, with the parallel development of monumental polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures, immersive Infinity Mirror Room installations, the long-running 'My Eternal Soul' painting series, and an intensive print-publishing practice.

Kusama's printmaking began in 1979, six years after her return to Japan, and has continued without interruption for forty-five years. The catalogue raisonné of her prints, expanded most recently in 2013 with twenty-five additional works, documents several hundred editioned prints across screenprint, silkscreen, lithograph, etching, embossing, and digital print formats. Editions are typically issued at fifty to two hundred impressions and are numbered against the catalogue (the 'Kusama 26,' 'Kusama 136,' 'Kusama 312' designations refer to catalogue raisonné numbers). Notable series include 'Pumpkin' (multiple variants in different colour combinations from the 1980s onwards), 'Dancing Pumpkin' (2004), 'Infinity Net' (1963-83 screenprints), 'Flower' (multiple variants), 'Sea,' 'Town,' 'Shoes,' and 'Lemon Squash.' The 1992 'Pumpkin (White T)' (Kusama 149) and 'Pumpkin (White Y)' (Kusama 150) are among her most-collected screenprints. The 2011 'Five Lithographs' portfolio was published in an edition of two hundred with the authorisation of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Late prints continue the established motif vocabulary in larger scale and at higher edition counts.