Yayoi Kusama

YAYOI KUSAMA (Matsumoto, Japan, 1929).
"Pumpkin coin purse.
Leather. Metal clasp.
Stamp on the inside.
Measurements: 14 x 11 x 4.5 cm.

The "pumpkin coin purse" by Yayoi Kusama, Monday patterns in black on yellow, characteristic of the famous artist, cover the entire outer surface. The vibrational effect of the optical patterns conveys the artist's inner world. As she herself explains in numerous interviews, it was in the family orchard where she used to spend hours painting flowers and fruits, that a pumpkin began to speak to her and made her lose her fear of a nature that had become aggressive to her. The nightmares transformed into visions and revelations about life, sexuality and the cosmos. Kusama first used the gourd design at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Yayoi Kusama is an artist and writer who, throughout her artistic career, has experimented with and developed a variety of artistic techniques including painting, collage, sculpture and performance and installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelia. Kusama is a forerunner of the pop art, minimalism and feminist art movements and influenced artists contemporary to her such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Born in Matsumoto (Nagano) to an upper middle-class family of seed merchants, Kusama began to develop an interest in art from an early age, which led her to study Nihonga (Japanese-style paintings) in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this Japanese style, she became interested in American and European avant-garde, mounting several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by abstract expressionism. Kusama switched to sculpture and installation as her primary media and became a fixture of New York avant-garde with her works exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal in the early 1960s when the artist became associated with the Pop Art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which nude participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. She returned to Japan permanently in 1973, where she has lived ever since in a psychiatric hospital, committed of her own free will. Throughout her career, Kusama has been honored with important awards both in Japan and abroad, including the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2003 and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale in 2006, in the category of painting. This artist has acquired special notoriety for her installations with mirrors, red balloons, toys and other objects, in the middle of which she placed herself on stage. Her works of recent years are paintings on cardboard in an ingenuist style. Among the most recent exhibitions dedicated to her production is the complete retrospective dedicated to her by the M.N.C.A. Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London, in 2011, which subsequently traveled to the same Tate, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. Kusama is currently represented at MoMA in New York, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Art Institute of Chicago and many other museums and art centers around the world.

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