Biography from AskART:
| Born in Matsumoto-shi, Nagano-Ken, Japan, Yayoi Kusama became a
colorful personality in the New York art world of the 1960s and has
been described as an "outsider, eccentric, an obsessive, a femme fatale
and a nonentity"
Her paintings
reflect childhood hallucinations, and her art has been an attempt to
exorcise those demons. In the late 1950s, she began a series of Infinity Net Paintings that reflected with dots, nets and flowers her childhood affliction of suffering from repetitive hallucinations.
In
the early 1960s when she first gained attention, she covered many of
her canvases with webs and spots and created "compulsion" furniture
with stuffed phallic protuberances. These experiments with soft
sculpture, mirrors and repetitive images preceded similar work by Claus
Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. In those years, she also did nude
protests in which she would paint willing subjects, often with polka
dots.
She studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and
Crafts and then moved to the United States in 1957 and had her first
one-woman show in 1959. In the 1960s, she collaborated in New
York with Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Morris, and she also
adopted performance art.
However, she spent much of the decade
in Europe, and was seemingly forgotten in America. She then moved
to The Hague and, in 1973, returned to Japan where she voluntarily
committed herself to a psychiatric hospital where she continued to live
while commuting to her Tokyo studio. She also wrote novels, short
stories, and poetry.
A 1989 retrospective at the Center for
International Contemporary Art in New York and her 1993 appearance at
the Venice Biennale rekindled interest in her collage and installation
work, especially in America and has influenced a number of young
artists, specifically Jessica Diamond.
In March, 1998, a
one-woman exhibition reviewing the last ten years of Kusama's work was
held at the Los Angeles County Museum, and in July 1998, a major
retrospective of her drawings from the 1950s were featured at the Peter
Blum Gallery.
Source:
Art in America, February 1999
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Yayoi Kusama is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Women Artists
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