This book accompanies Yayoi Kusama’s first major European retrospective exhibition, offering a comprehensive overview of the Japanese artist’s influential oeuvre, which spans more than eighty years.

The companion to the groundbreaking new retrospective at the Gropius Bau, this publication examines Kusama’s life and work through wholly original insights by leading experts. The book traces the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Europe and Germany in particular. It illuminates Kusama’s commitment to political and social issues in Europe, the US and Japan. A diverse selection of images and archival documents feature alongside texts by authors from different theoretical backgrounds. Essays discuss Kusama’s accomplishments in the worlds of fashion, film, art marketing and publishing. They focus on her engagement with different artistic spheres and offer genre-specific observations about her performances, installations and painting series. As panoramic and fascinating as its subject, this monumental retrospective guides viewers interested in Kusama towards a deeper understanding of her creative trajectory and of the breadth of her extraordinary career.

About the Author:

Stephanie Rosenthal is director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin. Previously she was chief curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, as well as artistic director of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, which took place in 2016.

A major career survey of Yayoi Kusama, one of the most widely admired and popular artists of our time, published in collaboration with M+, Hong Kong, to accompany M+’s first Special Exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, from 12 November 2022 to 14 May 2023.

Yayoi Kusama is that rare thing: an artist who has achieved truly global acclaim. In a wide-ranging career spanning seven decades and multiple media, she has established profound connections with audiences around the world. Emerging at the forefront of artistic experimentation in Asia in the mid-20th century, Kusama soon became a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s. Today, Kusama continues to communicate her highly personal and spiritual world view through her art.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the most comprehensive survey of her work to date. Structured around six thematic sections, ‘Infinity’, ‘Accumulation’, ‘The Biocosmic’, ‘Radical Connectivity’, ‘Death’ and ‘Force of Life’, the volume elucidates the aesthetic and philosophical concerns at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre.

In addition to a selection of Kusama’s writings, some of which have never been published before, the book features correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, an interview with critic and curator Yoshie Yoshida, and a roundtable discussion among leading authorities in the field. Also included are curatorial essays exploring different aspects of Kusama’s practice, and a detailed visual chronology of her life. Appealing not only to those already familiar with Kusama and her work, but also to anyone discovering it for the first time, this monograph reveals an artist who, while shaped by international artistic currents, remains deeply connected to the traditions and culture of her native Japan.

A retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, Japan's most prominent artist and 'Queen of the Polka Dots'

Avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama’s matchless creativity and originality have been captivating the world since she moved from Matsumoto, her hometown in Nagano, Japan, to the USA in 1958. In the last ten years alone, her retrospective exhibitions in four major European and American museums, including Tate Modern, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, have seen record attendance.

Kusama has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. This comprehensive publication, originally published to accompany a sell-out exhibition at Matsumoto City Museum of Art, offers a comprehensive overview of Kusama’s entire career, including works from her youth, when she indulged in drawing in order to escape from her hallucinations; paintings made when she was based in New York, including ‘Infinity Nets’ and ‘Polka Dots’; works from the 1980s and 1990s, when she participated in the Venice Biennale; and last but not least, the ongoing large-scale series ‘My Eternal Soul’. The plates are in chronological order and followed by detailed captions.

About the Authors:

Yayoi Kusama (born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content.
Akira Shibutami is a curator at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art.

World-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has worked in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation. Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, which originated with Phalli’s Field in 1965, situate viewers in kaleidoscopic spaces filled with multicolored lights or whimsical forms. These mirror-lined installations reflect endlessly, distorting rooms to project the illusion of infinite space. Over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities within the various contexts they have inhabited, from Kusama's “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present.

By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize the body of work amidst the resurgence of experiential practices within the global landscape of contemporary art. Generously illustrated, this publication invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career. Accompanying essays, an interview with the artist, and a scholarly chronology round out the book.

Exhibition at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, February 16 - May 14, 2017

About the Author:

Mika Yoshitake is Associate Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Melissa Chiu is Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Alexander Dumbadze is Chair and Associate Professor of Art History at The George Washington University, Washington, Dc. GloriaA Sutton is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University, Boston. Miwako Tezuka is Consulting Curator at Arakawa + Gins Reversible Destiny Foundation, New York.

This colourful children’s book tells the story of the renowned artist Yayoi Kusama and her quest to cover the world in polka dots – from here to infinity!

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it – the plants, the people, the sky – was covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she travelled all around the world and brought her dots with her, spreading them over big cities and small islands alike. Some people thought the dots were tiny, like cells, and others imagined them enormous, like planets. Yayoi said, ‘Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.’ Written by Sarah Suzuki, a MoMA curator, with illustrations by Ellen Weinstein, this colourful book tells the story of an artist whose work will not be complete until her dots cover the world, from here to infinity.

The most comprehensive book devoted to the incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in 1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that forged a new visual vocabulary - the Net paintings, which were composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973 she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today.

Since then, she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this book - created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo studio - the breadth and import of this watershed artist’s career are considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist’s extensive archive that have never been seen before.

The publication is timed to coincide with the artist’s major touring retrospective, which makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton.

This book comes in three different color patterns (all with the same cover design).

Contributors include: Leslie Camhi, RoseLeeGoldberg, Laura Hoptman, Chris Kraus, Arthur Lubow, Kevin McGarry, Louise Neri, Akira Tatehata, and Olivier Zahm.

About the Authors

Louise Neri is an editor, curator, writer, and consultant based in New York. As an international director at Gagosian Gallery, she works on research and development, exhibition and editorial programming, and communications. Yayoi Kusama is among the artists she represents and works with closely. Leslie Camhi, who first encountered Yayoi Kusama’s work nearly two decades ago, has written about art, books, fashion, and women’s lives for the New York Times, Vogue, and many other publications.  

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. Born and raised in Tokyo, Takaya Goto completed his post-graduate design education in the United States. He is a co-founder of Goto Design, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York. Laura Hoptman is Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she has organized the exhibitions “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions” (2002) and “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama” (1998), among many others. 

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Summer of Hate (Semiotexte, 2012) and two books of art criticism.  Since 1975, Arthur Lubow has worked primarily as a writer of long-reported articles for national magazines. For the last decade, he has been a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, specializing in the arts. Kevin McGarry is a writer, editor, and curator. He writes the contemporary art column “Out There” for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, is the art editor for V Magazine, and reviews exhibitions for Art Agenda and Artforum.com. Akira Tatehata is a curator, critic, and poet. Olivier Zahm is a curator, writer, editor, and co-founder of Purple Prose.

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Louis Vuitton, the global luxury fashion house, and world-famous artist Yayoi Kusama partner again, and in the storied history of the brand’s epic collaborations with artists, this is the most ambitious to date.

In this important volume about this powerhouse collaboration, artwork by trailblazing artist Yayoi Kusama is featured alongside the groundbreaking fashion collection she designed with Louis Vuitton, and is organized around the seminal artistic themes that inspired the project.

Edited by Ferdinando Verdi and Isabel Venero, the volume includes contributions from renowned experts in both fashion and art, including writer Jo-Ann Furniss who explores the collaboration, designer Marc Jacobs who initiated the house’s relationship with Kusama, and curators Mika Yoshitake and Philip Larratt-Smith, both of whom have organized important exhibitions on the artist’s work. And Hans Ulrich Obrist, the renowned curator and Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, London, Hans Ulrich Obrist talks with longtime Kusama expert Akira Tatehata.  

In the spirit of this iconic partnership and with a nod to the popular fascination with Kusama, the book includes musings from some of the most important contemporary artists and musicians working today — including Arca, Katherine Bradford, Anne Imhoff, Ryan McNamara, Raúl de Nieves, Ryan Trecartin, Nora Turato, and Jacolby Satterwhite — talking about Kusama’s impact and her extraordinary ability to build fantastical worlds through her signature polka dots and mirror balls, which are joyful representations of her deeply thoughtful philosophy about art and the universe.

About the Authors:

Jo-Ann Furniss is an editor, creative director, and writer. She was the editor-in-chief of Arena Homme+ from 2004 to 2011, and writes regularly for I-D, The Face, and AnOther Magazine, as well as the New York Times. Mika Yoshitake, PhD, is an independent curator with expertise in postwar Japanese art. She received her MA and PhD in Art History from UCLA.

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Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work.

Yayoi Kusama’s work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist’s long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line — her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family’s plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible.

Yayoi Kusama: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama’s work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature.

Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama’s engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG’s gardens and galleries, Yayoi Kusama: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

About the Authors:

Mika Yoshitake is an independent curator, and most recently Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Alexandra Munroe is Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Karen Daubmann is Associate Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Engagement at NYBG. Joanna L. Groarke is Director of Public Engagement and Library Exhibitions Curator, NYBG.

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An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time

"Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring." —The New York Times

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, which is arguably still one of the most comprehensive studies on her work to date, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

About the authors:

Akira Tatehata is a poet and art critic who has been awarded the 2005 Takami Jun Award for Literature.
Laura Hoptman is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Udo Kultermann was a curator and art historian who taught at Washington University in St. Louis.
Catherine Taft is deputy director of LAXART in Lo

Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love documents the artist's most recent exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which marked the US debut of The Obliteration Room, an all-white, domestic interior that viewers are invited to cover with dot stickers of various sizes and colors.

Widely recognized as one of the most popular artists in the world, Yayoi Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installation, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking happenings, events, and exhibitions. Now in her late 80s, Kusama is entering one of the richest creative periods of her life. Immersed in her studio six days a week, Kusama has spoken of her renewed dedication to creating art over the past years: “[N]ew ideas come welling up every day….Now I am more keenly aware of the time that remains and more in awe of the vast scope of art.”

Taking The Obliteration Room as its centerpiece, this catalogue reveals, in vivid large-scale plates, the transformation of the space from a clean white interior to a stunningly saturated room, with ceilings, walls, and furniture covered in myriad multicolored stickers put there by viewers over the course of the exhibition. The catalogue also includes beautiful reproductions of Kusama's new large-format paintings from My Eternal Soul series. Ranging from bright and densely pixelated forms, to umber figures with darker blues and muted oranges, these paintings demonstrate the artist's striking command of color, and her exceptional control over balance and contrast. Bold brushstrokes hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, these paintings introduce their own powerful pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. The catalogue continues with a selection of new, large Pumpkin sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since her studies in Japan in the 1950s, and which gained prominence in the 1980s, continuing to remain an essential part of her practice. Made of shiny stainless steel and featuring painted dots or dot-shaped perforations that recall The Obliteration Room, these immersive works seem created on human scale, with the tallest measuring 70 inches (178 cm). Vibrant plates capture how color, shape, size, and surface merge in these sculptures and mesmerize the viewer. Texts include a "Hymn to Yayoi Kusama" by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata and a poem by the artist herself.