“VAGABONDS STANDART 01 Yayoi Kumasa” Artist Biography

 

Yayoi Kusama

 

 

Avant-garde artist and novelist. Kusama’s work is characterized by paintings and sculptures marked with polka dots. She is known for large installations and three-dimensional works.

 

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano, Kusama started having visual and auditory hallucinations of auras around objects, fears and anxieties, around the time when she entered elementary school. The motifs of polka dots and nets she frequently use had already appeared at this time. Kusama visited the United States in 1957, when she made a vow to herself to create works better than those she had ever made, and burned thousands of her previous works. From around 1962, Kusama started producing soft sculptures themed on sex and food, thus becoming the pioneer of environmental art.

 

Her prominent recent activities include the release of documentary film Yayoi Kusama, I Adore Myself in 2008 and a retrospective exhibition that started from Museo National Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, then continued to Centre Pompidou in Paris, TATE Modern London, and finished at Whitney Museum in New York.