Article
Yayoi Kusama, artist
Kusama came to prominence in the New York art world during the 1960s. As a result of her turbulent home life and post-war stress, she developed a psycho logical disorder, often referred to as obsessional neurosis . Feeling ostracized from the rigid hierar chical society of Japan, Kusama left her homeland in search of artistic freedom. She arrived in America in 1958, carrying with her an assortment of some 2,000 watercolors and drawings. By 1962 she had participated in a wide variety of gallery and museum exhibitions both in the United States and Europe, exhibiting primarily Infinity Net paintings and related works on paper. In 1965 and 1966, Kusama's exhibi tions "Floor Show," "Driving Image Show," and "Infinity Mirror Room" at the Castellane Gallery in New York marked the most forceful presentation of the artist's obsessional imagery and launched her optically ensconcing Accumulation sculpture.
Kusama's preferred media included pen and ink, tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and pastel. The intimate, psychically charged works on paper she produced from the early 1950s through the mid- 1960s revealed Kusama's vibrant embrace of life's undulating currents. Her early drawings and watercolors articulate motifs and forms that fully anticipate the Net and Dot paintings of her early New York years and also the formal concerns of her installation art. Kusama's Net and Dot paintings all contain her signature motif-carefully controlled patterns of polka dots and interlinked webs of rhythmically painted linear net works. As she expanded her creative repertoire throughout the 1960s, she often reworked older drawings she had brought with her from Japan. Kusama frequently painted fluorescent nets on top of earlier orb drawings, inserted dots, unleashed pulsing new patterns, or even imposed synthetic netting over the entire surface of previous works.
Kusama's preferred media included pen and ink, tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and pastel. The intimate, psychically charged works on paper she produced from the early 1950s through the mid- 1960s revealed Kusama's vibrant embrace of life's undulating currents. Her early drawings and watercolors articulate motifs and forms that fully anticipate the Net and Dot paintings of her early New York years and also the formal concerns of her installation art. Kusama's Net and Dot paintings all contain her signature motif-carefully controlled patterns of polka dots and interlinked webs of rhythmically painted linear net works. As she expanded her creative repertoire throughout the 1960s, she often reworked older drawings she had brought with her from Japan. Kusama frequently painted fluorescent nets on top of earlier orb drawings, inserted dots, unleashed pulsing new patterns, or even imposed synthetic netting over the entire surface of previous works.
