Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was almost born among plants. As a child, she walked through her grandfather’s vast nursery, where she saw her first pumpkins, which were to become emblematic of her work.
The New York Botanical Garden, more than 100 hectares in the heart of the Bronx, has therefore long dreamed of paying tribute to this 92-year-old plastic artist, whose works now known around the world are approaching auction records for one year. living artist woman.
After several years of work, everything was ready to inaugurate a major exhibition in spring 2020, explains Karen Daubmann, vice-president of the Garden for exhibitions.
But the pandemic has postponed everything for a year, and the exhibition “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” does not finally open its doors until this Saturday, contributing to the gradual resumption of New York cultural life.
“It’s more than big pumpkins and big flowers, it’s really a look at the life of an incredible artist (…) and her roots in nature”, says Karen Daubmann.
From his first drawings of flowers and leaves, to his more recent series called “My Eternal Soul”, the exhibition traces his artistic progression through plants, a permanent source of inspiration and self-analysis, according to Mika Yoshitake, guest curator for the exhibition. As evidenced by a “Self-portrait”, which strangely resembles the blackened heart of a sunflower flower.
“She grew up with fields of flowers, peonies, zinnias, pumpkins,” Ms. Yoshitake says. “Going through them with his grandfather, these are his first memories”.
The rest will be more tormented, made of artistic talents thwarted in adolescence by his parents, then more than 15 years of immigration to the United States, mainly to New York. Admirer of Georgia O’Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama struggles to establish herself in a still very masculine art world and a post-war America where anti-Japanese discrimination is rife.
But for this avant-garde whose art is inseparable from periods of hallucinations and mental disorders, nature is also a world of colors and joy, like her “Dancing Pumpkin”, a giant sculpture created especially for the Bronx exhibition.
The “tentacles” of this pumpkin are covered with polka-dot patterns characteristic of Yayoi Kusama’s work. Symbols of “sun and energy”, according to Ms. Yoshitake, they have helped make this nonagenarian one of the most “Instagrammable” artists on the planet.
Karen Daubmann hopes that the exhibition, “full of color and cheerfulness”, will break attendance records, as was the case for other Kusama exhibitions before the pandemic, notably at the Cleveland Museum of Art, in 2019.
In view of the photos uploaded by the first visitors, its success, on social networks at least, seems assured.
Polka dot patterns, mesh, flowers, bright colors, the recurring themes of some 75 years of career are there. Just like the reflective steel balls of the “Narcissus Garden”, which roll slowly with the New York wind, 55 years after having been installed for the first time, without authorization, at the Venice Biennale.
Yayoi Kusama – who lives since 1977, voluntarily, in a psychiatric establishment in Tokyo – will not come in person to see this exhibition, scheduled to end on October 31st.
If she continues to paint on a daily basis – in particular to feed the series “My Eternal Soul”, some of whose paintings are exhibited in the Bronx – she is in a wheelchair and hardly ever leaves her home, underlines Mika Yoshitake.
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