"...a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement... Polka dots are a way to infinity."
Last week I went and saw the Kusama exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. Well worth a visit. Moving through the exhibition you move through the many varying phases of Kusama's career, her work both reflecting the turmoil surrounding her as well as her own obsessiveness (she has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Japan since 1977). She has explored a number of different mediums from sketching and oil painting to sculpture to full room installations and performance. Repeating patterns, dots in particular, feature heavily, a way of communicating the hallucinations that she frequently experienced.
I loved some of her early work, made using jute sacking, which echoed the upheaval that Japan was faced with following the Pacific War. It was when she went to New York in 1957 that she began experimenting with installations and performance art, along with staging a number of famous 'happenings' around the city in protest of the Vietnam War.
Shown below is one of her installations, 'Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life', 2011.
Well worth a visit. For more information visit the Tate's website.
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