Famous worldwide for her polka dot-covered pumpkins and sense-scrambling infinity rooms, Yayoi Kusama has also spent her lengthy career working with colour palettes more advanced than the simple two-tone schemes of her 2D and 3D-rendered fruits. This exhibition, at the artist’s dedicated Tokyo museum, traces in detail the evolution of Kusama’s distinctive colour expression from the late 1940s through to the present decade.
Darkly surreal hues are evident in the earliest work featured here, but following her relocation to the US in 1957, Kusama replaced these with more austere colour schemes as she intently pursued a sense of self-obliteration. This practice in turn evolved by the 1970s – when the artist returned to Japan – into a richly poetic use of colour, as seen in the painting 'Summer Comes to a Hat' (1979) whose hues emit a neon-like glow.
The '80s and '90s then saw Kusama employ colour so intense that it could induce dizziness, aligning in spirit with the disorientation created by her infinity rooms. Some more recent pieces, such as 2021’s poignant 'Every Day I Pray for Love' included here, combine in a single work the above-mentioned extremes of vividness and darkness, in what might be the culmination of a life similarly coloured by both spectacular success and deep despair.
Note that tickets are not available at the door; they must be purchased in advance online.
Text by Darren Gore.