2024-04-23
In March this year, Yayoi Kusama is turning 93 years old, being one of the most expensive, contemporary artists. The interdisciplinary creator is the author of paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, videos, performances, musical compositions, novels, and poems. Her art defies clear classification, it is most frequently described as pop-art, abstraction, or surrealism.
Dots are the most characteristic motif of Kusama’s artistic output. The first paintings in which this pattern dominates were produced in the late 1950s when Kusama, influenced by the correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, had decided to emigrate to the United States. She left artistically traditionalist Japan, discovering the avant-garde bohemia of New York. Since then, she creates polka dots works inspired by hallucinations she experiences as a result of her mental disorders. Repeating the same motif allows Kusama to tame her anxiety, adding to her art a therapeutic dimension.
The symptoms of mental disorders have accompanied Kusama since early childhood. Growing up in a dysfunctional family where she was exposed to both physical and mental violence, young Yayoi suffered from anxiety disorders and depression, and later in life she also faced compulsive obsessions and depersonalization. Despite the difficulties that mental problems cause her in everyday life, they are crucial to her career. She is inspired by the states she experiences, and she recreates them in the creative process. Multiplication of dots is for her an attempt to escape from her sensations, at the same time being an important record of their omnipresence in her reality.
Kusama’s art, acentric and difficult to comprehend holistically, is symbolic infinity in its purest form. The attempt to capture boundlessness of time and space, and the search of universal truth are realized in her works as the repetitive accumulation of shapes, suspended in undefined sphere. “Dots Obsession” (2003) is a series of installations engaging the viewers in a psychedelic, transcendental experience. The rooms covered with mirrored dots are filled with phallically shaped objects. For Kusama, creating spaces full of multiplied dots is a therapeutic confrontation with her fears resulting in arguably the most recognizable Japanese art.