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INFINITY KUSAMAThe Fuller Building 41 East 57th Street, Second Floor New York, NY 10022 212-628-1600 • info@benrimon.com • www.davidbenrimon.com © 2021, David Benrimon Fine Art LLC KUSAMA: INFINITYTable of ContentsBIOGRAPHY��������9 PRINTMAKING���10 FLOWERS���������13 PUMPKINS�������27 FRUITS�����������39 VARIOUS���������47biography Yayoi Kusama is one of the most important female artists working today. She is recognized for her artistic concepts of infinity, eternity and love through her signature use of infinity nets, polka dots and pumpkins. The Japanese artist’s highly influential career spans mesmeric paintings, immersive rooms, hypnotic installations, participatory performances and Happenings, outdoor sculpture, films, literary works, fashion, design and more. With a mental condition giving her hallucinatory visions of repetitive nets and dots, Kusama depicts these motifs as her mode of self-healing, independent from labels of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Surrealism and Pop Art. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto City in the Nagano Prefecture of Japan to a family of high social standing, who for a century had managed wholesale seed nurseries. She grew up surrounded by mountain ranges, flower beds and greenhouses of violets and zinnias. Throughout her childhood, Kusama developed an obsessive anxiety and fear due to her bitter familial life, which led to visual and auditory hallucinations. She experienced talking pumpkins and flowers, as well as repeating infinity nets and floating dots expanding over her surroundings. These “images [that] poured from [her] mind the way lava flows from an erupting volcano” 1 became the foundation of Kusama’s practice. Kusama first incorporated these dots and nets into her drawings around the age of ten, forming the basis of her decades-long career. In a small Matsumoto bookshop in 1955, Kusama found works by Georgia O’Keeffe in a book. As a young Japanese artist, with only brief training at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama wrote a letter to the artist and O’Keeffe replied furthering her determination to move across the world to America. In November 1957, when she was 27 years old, Kusama arrived in New York as a struggling artist but soon established herself as an important avant-garde trailblazer. Her first breakthroughs were a solo exhibition of infinity-nets at Brata Gallery in 1959 and a show at Stephen Radich Gallery where she displayed a 33-foot long net canvas of small hand-painted white loops in 1961. Kusama continued to participate in many important exhibitions showing paintings and sculpture, as well as staging groundbreaking and influential Happenings like body painting festivals and anti-war demonstrations. She even founded a fashion company which marketed radically avant-garde clothes, called Kusama’s Fashions. In New York, she befriended artists Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell, Eva Hesse and Andy Warhol, and shared a studio building with Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain and On Kawara. After an explosive rise to fame in New York, Kusama returned to Tokyo in 1975 to voluntarily live in a psychiatric hospital as her visions worsened, where she continues to live today. In 1966, Kusama exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in 1993 she was invited to represent Japan, as the first solo artist and first woman to show at the Japanese Pavilion, where she created Mirror Room (Pumpkin). Kusama has exhibited extensively internationally, including significant solo-shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York in 1989 and a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that traveled to the MoMA, New York, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo from 1998 to 1999. Kusama’s current exhibition “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” at the New York Botanical Garden opened in Spring 2021. Her work resides in museums and art institutions worldwide. In 1994, she created a monumental yellow pumpkin to be permanently installed on Naoshima Island in Japan. The Benesse Art Site placed the work in an open-air installation at the end of a pier over the water.Next >