BEAUTIFUL CELL

ARTIST | FEMINIST

Dogged by mental illness as a child, hallucinations were a preoccupation and provided fodder for Yayoi Kusama’s artistry. A theme of endless dots and repetitive marks informed her art from the beginning.

Born in Japan to a prosperous family, her mother often engaged young Yayoi as a spy to follow her father and report his infidelities in specific detail. Seeing her father in sexual situations traumatized her and she developed a lifelong aversion to the male body and to sex in general.

Yayoi sprang on the male-dominated New York City scene in the 1960s. Successful contemporaries like Andy Warhol, David Hockney and others came to admire and imitate her style of painting. She worked in a variety of media, including film, fashion, performance and sculpture. Her influence was far-reaching and included artistic influences like feminism, war resistance, minimalism, capitalism, social injustice and the patriarchy.

For fifteen years, Yayoi’s creations were plentiful and wildly diverse and she often worked for three or four days without resting. She went back to Japan to seek treatment for exhaustion and declining physical health. After being diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive neurosis, Kusama checked herself into a mental hospital and has willingly lived there ever since. She continues to work obsessively at her studio across the street.

Kusama reigns as one of the most iconic, revolutionary and famous contemporary female artists of all time. Despite significant challenges, she made sense of the world – for herself and others.