Yayoi Kusama

Subject Matter:

From Kusama’s work, I can infer that she is trying to communicate her work through circles that may be acting like all the different planets. She could be portraying her obsession with certain shapes and colours. Critics have variously certified her work to minimalism, feminism, obsessivism, surrealism, pop and abstract expressionism. “One thing for certain is that it has been a long and strange journey for Kusama, who is 74 in 2004.”

Technique:

In Kusama’s work, she mostly does paintings, collages, sculptures and environmental works and they are all similar in the sense of sharing an obsession with repetition, pattern and build up. A lot of her work seems to be of smooth layers; some may be 3D and have bumps but mostly are not layered. Even so, she does have dramatic angles in her work that creates a sense of again, obsession.

Artist’s Career:

·        *Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama remembers growing up “as an unwanted child of        unloving parents.”

·        * A penchant for drawing and painting led Kusama to plot her escape with the help of art    magazines, and after sewing black-market American currency into the seams of her clothes,  Kusama fled Japan in search of  her hero, Georgia O’Kleeffe.

·         * Kusama came to New York in 1958 and began to create a life for herself as an artist

·         * Kusama made the front page of the New York Daily News in August 1969, after infiltrating the   Museum of  Modern Art’s sculpture garden with a bunch of naked co-conspirations to perform   her “Grand Orgy to  Awaken the Dead.”

Links with own work:

I have really enjoyed researching about Yayoi Kusama as I love her style and her obsession with dots and circles on all her sculptures and paintings. I chose this artist because I want my final chair design to have that sense of abstract, repetition yet originality to it.