Yayoi Kusama - Infinity

a brand new exhibition bringing together works by the iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, from her emergence on the global art scene through to her current work. The chronological arc of this exhibition provides insight not only into the breadth and variety of her work, but also the unifying threads that have guided her practice from the New York of the early 1960s to the present day. This presentation lives within the framework of the “Hors-les-murs” programme of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, thus following the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience.

Yayoi Kusama is a prolific artist whose work is remarkable for its shape-shifting identity and compulsive proliferation. At every stage of her career she has displayed an extraordinary level of creative energy as a painter, sculptor, performance artist, novelist and fashion designer. The pieces presented in this exhibition facilitate exploration of the relationship between her creative journey and certain major currents in the history of Japanese and American art, against and with which Kusama has built her practice. Although her artistic career has interacted with, and inspired, both pop art and minimalism, her essential strength lies in the impressive independence that her highly personal pieces reflect and retain, right up to the most recent pieces shown in this exhibition.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in Japan’s Nagano prefecture, and based in Tokyo since 1973, Yayoi Kusama grew up surrounded by plants in a family who owned a plant nursery and seed farm. She was around 10 years old and already drawing and painting when she experienced her first hallucinations. These included envisioning the interior of her family home covered in flower motifs that eventually engulfed her. These childhood memories form the basis of her mythology and its accompanying psychic turmoil, both of which have driven her art ever since. In a process she describes as “self-therapy," she compulsively repeats motifs that have become powerful signatures and are clear to see in the pieces curated in this exhibition. The Infinity Nets and Dots of the 1960s have developed in more recent pieces to become floating forms suggesting stars, cells and total abstraction. Throughout her career, she has used this technique to give form to her fears and obsessions.

These motifs give shape to Kusama's essential philosophy. At the heart of the exhibition, the first of her many Infinity Mirror Rooms, Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (or Floor Show) (1965/2013), welcomes visitors to become disorientated as they immerse themselves in a world of endlessly repeated polka dots. In this iconic environment, as in the poetry that accompanies Every Day I Pray for Love (2023) and in her repetitive painting practice, the artist reveals both her hallucinatory visions and her philosophy on the place we occupy as individuals within the universe. Through the broad diversity of techniques she uses in her Dots and Infinity Nets, Kusama beckons the viewer to think about infinity and allow themselves to be absorbed by the visual experience in a process she calls “self-obliteration.” She effectively invites us to step back and become one with the environment that envelops us all.