Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama grew up among plants. As a child, wandering around her grandfather’s spacious nursery, she first saw the pumpkins that would define her business.
Now, the 92-year-old man’s sculptures span 100 hectares of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx in a large exhibition that was delayed a year due to the pandemic.
Kusama: the cosmic natureIt was scheduled to open in March 2020 after years of preparation and will finally welcome visitors beginning Saturday as cultural life gradually returns to New York City.
“It’s not just about big pumpkins and big flowers,” explains Karen Dobman, vice president of lawn exposures.
“She is really looking at the life of an amazing artist and her roots in the natural world.”
From Kusama’s earliest flower and leaf drawings to his most recent series My soul is immortal The exhibition tracks his progress as an artist through his love of plants and is a constant source of inspiration and self-analysis, according to the Mika Yoshitake exhibition catalog.
for example Personal photography, That resembles the black center of a sunflower.
“She grew up with fields of flowers, peonies, ornaments and pumpkins. His earliest memories were wandering around with his grandfather and that’s why there are so many botanical images, ”Yoshitake said.
His later memories were even more haunted: artistic talents retained as a teenager by his parents and then 15 years of living as an immigrant in the United States, primarily in New York.
Kusama, a fan of American modernist painter Georgia O’Keefe, struggled to establish herself in a male-dominated art world and postwar America where anti-Japanese sentiment was rife.
But for Kusama, the avant-garde, whose art is deeply affected by hallucinations and mental illness, nature is also a world full of color and joy, embodied in its giant. Pumpkin dance Sculpture created specifically for the Bronx.
The pumpkin ‘claws’ are covered in the distinctive pixelated patterns of Kusama’s work. According to Yoshitake, these symbols of the sun and energy have helped make the unborn one of the most popular Instagram artists on the planet.
Daubman describes the exhibition as “colorful” and “fun” and hopes it will surpass attendance numbers, as has been the case at previous Kusama exhibitions, most notably at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2019.
If the photos already published on the Internet by the first visitors are something to pass, their success, at least on social networks, seems guaranteed.
Polka dot patterns, tights, flowers, and bright colors are recurring themes throughout Kusama’s 75-year career.
Orbs of steel that reflect it Narciso Park Rolling slowly in the winds of New York, 55 years after it was first shown, without permission, in front of the entrance to the Venice Biennale.
Kusama, who has been living voluntarily since 1977 in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, will not travel to see the exhibition, which will be open until October 31.
He is in a wheelchair and hardly ever leaves the house, according to Yoshitake, but he continues to paint daily, mostly to feed himself. My soul is immortal Series and production of work tables, some of which are part of the exhibition.
“It was a difficult year and no one was really inspired,” Daubmann said. “I hope this exhibition has inspired everyone.” – French press agency
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