Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective

About the exhibition

Presented across almost 3000 m², Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective offered an overview of the key periods in her oeuvre, which spanned more than 70 years, and featured a number of current works as well as a newly realised Infinity Mirror Room.

The retrospective focused primarily on tracing the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Germany and Europe.

Since the 1960s, the artist has been actively engaged in realising exhibition projects outside the former centre of her life in New York and showing her work in a European context. This has also brought to the fore Kusama’s role as a pioneer of personal branding, who early on in her practice intentionally staged and marketed her own artistic persona and multidisciplinary work.

Within the exhibition framework, reconstructions allowed viewers to experience the pioneering nature of her presentational forms and artistic subjects, making accessible Kusama’s early exhibition projects in Germany and Europe in the 1960s and central solo exhibitions in the USA and Asia from the 1950s to 1980s.