One of her works from 1950 carries the uber-heavy title “Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization,)” employing sodden black, brown and tan tones. In “Heart,” a painting from 1954, you can feel her struggling to find a method and a voice as she creates diminutive gouaches in murky red and black tones. Her first dots showed up in the beginning of the 1950s, though she experimented with them as early as 1939, in an untitled schoolgirl portrait of her mother. Is she a perpetual fly in the ointment or a queen bee who just couldn’t bust out of the hive?Īs a young woman, before she ever set foot outside of her native Japan, she was tackling formidable questions about life, existence and death, painting with odd combinations like oil and enamel on seed sack. Is it because it’s a “quirky,” “arty” place to live, or have poverty, sexism and ethnocentricity been such an obstacle over the years that she needs the structural support? People have wondered if she’s a nut job, a dedicated artist or both. You have to ask why this 83-year-old woman has voluntarily remained inside a mental institution in Japan as her a home base. On the inside, which all the W magazine air kisses in the world can’t conceal, Kusama is about decades of raging struggles with precarious mental balance, gender, ethnicity, money, power, class, self-mythology, annihilation, life and death, peppered with a bit of wonder. On the surface of this well-fueled publicity blitz, Yayoi Kusama is a dotty (pun intended) old grandma all about fun, polka dots and puffy balloons, including her eye-popping window display for the Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Yayoi Kusama’s “Dots Obsession” (2009–2012) against the ceiling of the Whitney basement (all photos by Ellen Pearlman unless otherwise noted)
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