Yayoi Kusama’s artistic career spans over sixty years of breathtaking work. The current exhibition at the Tate Modern highlights moments of her most intense innovation. Kusama is one of Japan’s most celebrated living artists. Since the 1940’s she has created an extensive body of work. The exhibition demonstrates Kusama’s artistic development and shift from painting provincial Japan, to sculpture and immersive experiences.
The exhibition is conceived as a series of rooms. Each room documents the artist’s stance at the time. Expert curation makes each room become an immersive environment, so that single sculptures and paintings make a whole.
Much of Kusama’s work provokes a hallucinatory experience. Repetition on a theme demonstrates a relentless nature. The accumulation and use of dense pattern is almost meditative.
The show includes a group of Kusama’s first ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, created when trying to break the New York art scene in the 50’s. Huge canvases of insistently repeated, scalloped brushstrokes line the walls. Created using one single colour, the effect is one of an undulating net. These works anticipate the techniques of minimal and contemporary art, however their handmade nature highlights stamina and obsession.
Following her success with the ‘Infinity Nets’, Kusama developed her craft to include sculpture. Kusama’s ‘Accumulation Sculptures’ feature everyday items, covered in stuffed fabric repeated forms. The effect is quite dreamlike.
‘Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show’ features a white painted, fabric phallus- encrusted rowing boat. Exhibiting the boat in a room whose walls, floor and ceiling feature a white-on-black motif of the same boat creates the immersive experience. The use of this motif predates the development of Pop Art and Warhol’s ‘Cow Wallpaper’.
Perhaps the motif most synonymous with the artist however, is the polka dot. The room sized installation ‘I’m here, but nothing’ is a darkened, domestic sitting room. The room is transformed into a hallucinatory experience as the walls and all furnishings are covered in fluorescent sticker spots that glow in the dark. A fantastical explosion of colour, the repeated motif creates the illusion of movement. The psychedelic spots confuse the senses by interrupting the vision so it appears that they hang in the air.
The show comes to a close with a new installation created for the exhibition. ‘Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life’ is incredible. The use of mirrors and thousands of coloured LED lights creates the illusion of infinite space. Walls, the ceiling and floor disappear so that you see versions of yourself, suspended in space. A completely bizarre sensory experience, this installations has the ability to fright and excite the viewer and makes the show a must see.
Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, 9 February- 5 June 2012
