Yayoi Kusama @ Centre Pompidou


The Centre Pompidou presents the first French retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, with a chronological exploration of over 150 of her works from 1949 to 2011.
Featured are the iconic Infinity Nets - monochrome canvases filled with repetitive loops of paint to create hypnotic abstract paintings with no end and no beginning. We see the development of the idea of Self-Obliteration, which started when the artist was a child at the dining table, and experienced the hallicination that the flowers on the table cloth spread across the ceiling and floor of the room and across Kusama herself. As well as sculptures, paintings, photos and video installations, the exhibition also features "environments" in which the spectator becomes fully immersed in a world created by Kusama - a red room decorated with white polka dots and floating blobs of the same motif, and a mirrored room with twinkling dotted lights reflected to infinity - both creating sensory experiences in which the viewer can meditate Kusama's questioning of man's place in the cosmos. Following her attempted suicide in the 70s, Kusama chose to live in a psychiatric institution in her native Japan, where she still resides today, not far from her studio in which she produces her latest paintings. The last room of the exhibition features her work from 2009 to 2010, a new series of canvases featuring ideograms and simplistic puzzles, reflecting, as the rest of the exhibition, the psychological complexities of the artist's mind.

Yayoi Kusama at The Centre Pompidou until 9th January, 2012. 


3 comments:

  1. Oh, this looks so cool! Thanks for sharing. Must try to check this out soon.

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  2. We will just miss this exhibit. I would love to see it.
    V

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  3. Hello,
    Oh, this looks so cool! Thanks for sharing.........

    ReplyDelete