‘Yayoi Kusama: A retrospective’ showing in Berlin

Yayoi Kusama is one of the world’s most important contemporary artists, well known for her instagrammable infinity room projects and her polka-dot artworks amongst others. This spring, a very special retrospective on the Japanese artist is showing at Gropius Bau as part of Berliner Festwochen.

Her oeuvre covers more than 70 years of creative work: When it comes to contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama is the queen. Ever since the 1960s, when her works started to gain international attention, the Japanese artist has inspired generations of contemporary art heads with her incomparable creative work. Starting off as a female performance artist, Yayoi Kusama has been doing pretty much everything in the field: Performance art, installations, fashion, or photography. There are many remarkable things about the queen of contemporary, two of them being that she has been driven by the desire for an immersive union of body and artwork, and an urge to redefine the role of women in art.

The exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: A retrospective” at Gropius Bau in Berlin is the very first retrospective in Germany, and focuses on the artist’s perception in Europe. Yayoi Kusama has spent most of her creative life in the USA; the exhibition in Berlin now wants to shed light on the times Kusama spent in Germany and Europe, which haven’t been researched well so far.

Presented across almost 3000 m², “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective” will offer an overview of the key periods in her oeuvre, and feature a number of current works as well as a newly released Infinity Mirror Room. Besides exploring Kusama’s artistic activities in Germany, the exhibition focuses on the journey starting from the artist’s early creative output to her accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments.

Yayoi Kusama is a pioneer of self-marketing and building a brand out of herself, which becomes extremely relevant in times of social media. Her remarkable life is being turned into a graphic novel dedicated to the colorful, dotted world of Kusama. The novel as well as the hype about some of her unrealized artworks soon being up for sale at New York auction house Bonhams are proof that Kusama, now 92, has created a timeless oeuvre.