A Woman to Know: Yayoi Kusama
I am just another dot in the world. — Yayoi
(Yayoi Kusama, "Fireflies on the Water")
Yayoi Kusama is besotted with dots -- dot maps, polka dots, dotted lines, mirror dots and more. The 86-year-old Japanese artist is famous for her zany paintings, bizarre outdoor sculpture and colorful mirror installations. Her personal life is just as notorious as her artistic one: she has lived voluntarily inside a Japanese mental institution since 1977 ("my artwork is an expression of my life, especially of my mental disease")), and she lists other creative luminaries (including Joseph Cornell, my personal favorite artist) as close friends and lovers.
Yayoi has staged performance art orgies, built entire mirror-walled rooms lit by disco balls, posed naked in downtown Manhattan and collaborated with Louis Vuitton. Her most expensive paintings are the "infinity nets," giant white canvases dotted with almost-invisible gray spots. According to The Guardian, she's the most popular artist in the world -- more people attended her museum exhibitions in 2014 than saw work by such famous male artists as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and even Andy Warhol.
Add to your reading list:
Infinity Net: An Autobiography (Yayoi Kusama)
Read more:
Man-hating artist covers Tate Modern in dots (Bloomberg)
The Polka-Dot Loving Art Legend I Initially Mistook for Crazy (The Atlantic)
The stunning story of the woman who is the world's most popular artist (The Observer)
The price of being female (The Economist)
Yayoi Kusama named the world's most popular artist in 2014 (The Guardian)
Look more:
Dots Obsession Interactive (Queensland Art Gallery)
Flowers that bloom tomorrow (Victoria Miro Garden)
Outdoor Sculptures (Victoria Miro Garden)
Yayoi Kusama (Gagosian Gallery)
"Yellow Trees Growing" (The Wall Street Journal)
Kusama's Infinity Net Paintings (Whitney Museum)
Dots Obsession (artnet)
Yayoi's comeback at the Tate Modern (The Telegraph)
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