Seeing spots is par for the course at the Centre Pompidou’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition – France’s first ever retrospective dedicated to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929), known for her recurrent obsession with dot motifs and her influence on artists such as Andy Warhol and Mike Kelley.
Even before Pop Art came to be, the artist used repetition as a process; cultivating her own radical style by flirting with a variety of avant-gardes, yet remaining marginal to them all. Her work makes you feel as though you’re walking through space (on hallucinogenic drugs): her performances exude sweat, sex and body paint; her installations are awash with stiletto shoes and penile forms; and the rooms, Dots Obsessions and Infinity Mirrored Room (the piece de resistance), create surreal optical illusions, transporting you into imaginary worlds of red and white polka dots and (in the case of Infinity Mirrored Room) outer space.
The exhibition will be travelling to Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, London’s Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, but only the Pompidou is hosting the monochromes and performances of the Sixties, the (1998) Dots obsessions mirrored room, and the “formless” sculptures such as The Moment of Regeneration (2004), so don’t miss it.