“The Yayoi Kusama Phenomenon Takes New York: Record-Breaking Exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery”

Not that, as is often suggested, the work of this minimalist pop woman, who will star in an exhibition at the Guggenheim starting June 27, has surfaced after years of obscurity. A glance at the list of exhibitions of the last few decades, going back at least to the 1993 Venice Biennale, indicates otherwise. But it is true that her work has acquired a relevance that she had not had.

The previous show on Zwirner, one of the most powerful people in art today, attracted 94,000 visitors. The one now, which is being organized just two years away, will break the 100,000 mark, according to Maximiliano Durón, from the hundred-year-old magazine ‘Artnews’. It is made up of his flower sculptures, his speckled pumpkin figures and one of his characteristic ‘infinity rooms’, mirror game installations in which the viewer sees his figure replicated to infinity, as it has been since the exhibition on 25 Anniversary at the Guggenheim.

There are also 35 paintings. Kusama has always practiced painting, although this aspect of his career has not attracted as much attention as the rest, although it will be included in the Guggenheim exhibition, which is currently in the M + museum in Hong Kong. Zwirner has a very compelling reason for focusing on these pieces: they sell more and better than installations and large sculptures.

Art and mental illness

Kusama lived in New York from 1958 to 1975. She arrived from Tokyo with some two thousand watercolors and drawings in her luggage. The moles that would become one of his hallmarks already appeared in them.

In the American city, in his first exhibition, he presented a series of white paintings that received very good reviews, including that of his later partner, the artist and critic Donald Judd.

His move to the most daring color placed him in the coordinates of pop and in fact he shared a gallery with his representatives. He has always said that his artistic practice is a way to “correct” his mental illness. He entered a Tokyo mental hospital of his own free will in 1977, where he continues to live.