The 96-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a living legend of international art, has her work displayed in a major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler. The exhibition showcases seven decades of artistic creation from one of the world's most recognized contemporary artists.
Exhibiting at the Venice Biennale represents the dream of many artists, but only a few achieve this reality. Before the world's most important art exhibition, a ruthless selection process takes place. The stakes are high: being featured here offers the chance to give one's artistic career a major boost. This was also clear to Yayoi Kusama, born in Japan in 1929, when in 1966 at the age of 37, she presented her installation "Narcissus Garden" in the Giardini directly next to the Italian Pavilion.
It was a real coup. Cleverly and boldly, the artist opposed the sorting mechanisms of the art world with this action. Kusama had simply invited herself and her installation with 1,500 silvery gleaming steel balls to the world art exhibition. As a performer in a golden kimono, she sold the mirroring spheres for two US dollars each to the Biennale audience until she was eventually banned by the organizers. However, the art was allowed to remain. In 1993, Kusama returned to Venice, this time in the official role as Japan's representative at the 45th Biennale.
The legendary installation "Narcissus Garden" is one of the first works that visitors encounter in Switzerland's first Yayoi Kusama retrospective, which recently opened at the Fondation Beyeler. The spheres float gently on the water lily pond at the front of the Renzo Piano building, glittering in the sun. One recalls the story of the beautiful youth from ancient mythology who fell in love with his own reflection and ultimately perished from his unfulfilled love.
In a subtle way, various motifs that have always run through Yayoi Kusama's long artistic life are introduced: the psychological dimension of mirrors, plants and their forms, the heights and depths of human emotions, and the power and transience of love. Somewhere in the exhibition stands a cube-shaped monitor with recordings of various performances and happenings by the artist from the late 1960s. Up to her waist, Kusama stands as a plein air painter in a pond, surrounded by water lily leaves. The paper on which she paints floats on the water surface. A frog jumps into the pond water.
Like gelatinous frog spawn clusters, circles and dots pile up in some of Kusama's paintings. They make clear that when it comes to depicting the sublimity of nature, it doesn't always have to be an image of an imposing mountain range. One can also take the other path and become microscopic and structuralist. In the end, the large, imposing structures are based on a branching network structure in the small - and even a large tree grows from a small seed.
Kusama is more than a superstar or a living legend, explains Sam Keller, the director of the Foundation, at the press conference. She is an icon. She is the most famous living artist. However, fortunately, the exhibition with around 300 works from 70 years of creation by the now 96-year-old artist is not primarily about the eccentric pop phenomenon Kusama. Rather, curator Mouna Mekouar and her team sensitively trace the arduous and rocky path of a world artist. Walking through the exhibition, she makes the development and continuous evolution of various basic motifs in Kusama's work comprehensible to the audience.
This creates a differentiated picture of a work that also reflects the undercurrents of contemporary culture. Spectacle and knowledge production maintain a beneficial balance in Riehen. The focus is on conveying aesthetic peculiarities and gaining insight. Already in the first exhibition room with early drawings and paintings from Kusama's childhood and youth, motifs appear that would later become the artist's trademark. A drawing from 1939, when Kusama was ten years old, shows the portrait of a woman with closed eyes: her face is covered with dots and small circles that spread across the entire image space. Kusama was already confronted with visions and acoustic hallucinations in her childhood, according to the exhibition booklet.
"Drawing calmed me, I recovered from my shock and fear," the artist later wrote in her autobiography published in the early 2000s. Kusama recognized early that art was her way of dealing productively with hallucinations and obsessive-compulsive disorders and keeping them in check. Only reluctantly did her strict and authoritarian parents give her permission to move to Kyoto for art studies in the late 1940s. However, Japan was far too small and isolated for the ambitions of the young artist who wanted to conquer the world with her work.
In the mid-1950s, she went to the United States and, after a brief stopover in Seattle, finally landed in New York, the pulsating heart of the international scene. A separate hall in Riehen presents the paintings from this time of arrival, whose seductive aesthetic power remains unbroken to this day. The large-format, seemingly monochrome canvases are covered with net-like patterns of uniform brushstrokes. These paintings speak of patience, devotion, meticulousness, and the desire to give infinity a kind of form. The vibrating character of the art literally transfers into the exhibition space.
During the flight from Japan to the United States, the artist had seen the Pacific Ocean from above for the first time and observed the movements of the seemingly endless water surface. With her so-called Infinity Net paintings - monumental yet meticulous, repetitive, detail-obsessed - Kusama positioned herself against the gestural Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, which was setting the tone in those years. When the paintings were exhibited in a New York gallery in the early 1960s, the new New Yorker made a name for herself overnight in the scene.
Kusama continuously worked on expanding her artistic practice and translating contemporary impulses into her own artistic system. This resulted and continues to result in many interesting feedback loops. In the first half of the 1940s, for example, she was forced as a child in Japan to work in a sewing factory for military parachutes. She then used the sewing technique from the early 1960s onward for the production of her peculiar, sexually charged soft sculptures.
With this group of works, the painter became an installation artist. Kusama sewed countless phallic-shaped textile bags, which she then attached in a second step to clothes, shoes, mannequins, chairs, makeup cases, and even a rowing boat. She had found the form of the male organ repulsive and also viewed it with fear, Kusama later noted in her autobiography. "That's why I had to create again and again what I hated, what I found repulsive, what I was afraid of - that was precisely my artistic expression. With this psychosomatic art, as I call it, I create a new self."
Kusama's psychosomatic installations hit the nerve of the 1968 student movement, which had written sexual revolution on its banners. In her so-called Naked Performances in New York and Woodstock, Kusama painted her models with her characteristic polka-dot pattern. However, she didn't get stuck on the hippie trip, just as she cannot be assigned to any art movement. Kusama was and remains her own universe. In the 1990s, she pulled the dots over huge bright yellow pumpkin sculptures. The phalli of the early years had meanwhile grown into large dotted tentacles that now dig into the architecture like gigantic roots in the basement of the Foundation as part of an Infinity installation.
With her pronounced cultural sensitivity, the artist also sensed the entrepreneurial core of hippie culture. In the early 1970s, she founded her own fashion label in New York to once again cross the boundary between art and fashion world with an act of artistic self-marketing. Her designs were available in chic New York department stores, and for a short time she even operated her own boutique. In this way, she managed to reach a new audience and a different market. From this perspective, later joint ventures with global fashion corporations seem only consistent. The Uniqlo T-shirts in Kusama design or the polka-dot handbags produced by Louis Vuitton testify to a rare eye-level relationship between art and commerce.
In 1973, the artist returned exhausted and permanently to Japan. Since 1977, she has been living self-determinedly in the open ward of a hospital in Tokyo, near which her studio is located. In 1989, her international rediscovery began with a first retrospective at the New York Center for International Contemporary Arts. Once again, she achieved something that probably no one before her had managed: through continuous work in relative seclusion between hospital and studio, she achieved international omnipresence over the years, which has only been amplified by social media in the past decade and a half.
Yayoi Kusama has succeeded in merging her art with contemporary pop culture. The universality of polka dots is unbeatable and transcends all contexts. However, the mirroring surfaces in her installations don't just reflect an image of their surroundings. Kusama arranges them so that an almost infinite depth is created. From this perspective, her approach is psychological. The artist makes no secret of her existential struggles. Art became her lifeline, and the courage to show her vulnerability in public became her strength.
"Art is survival art: Every day I fight against pain, anxiety, and fear, and the only thing I have found as a remedy against my illness is to continue creating art." She achieved much more. Against all resistance, she realized her vision and changed the art world. This is why the exhibition in Riehen has an almost therapeutic dimension. "Every Day I Pray for Love" is the title of the current series of paintings that the artist began in 2021 and continues to this day. "I like myself. Love forever" is written in marker on a dotted acrylic painting from 2022.
The icon never became rigid but remained human. She sends messages in touching images. They are poetic imperatives that celebrate the beauty of life and love despite suffering. The retrospective runs until January 25, 2026, at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, in collaboration with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
