THE OBLITERATION ROOM YAYOI KUSAMA SERIES

Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. Kusama has painted pumpkins since childhood, and in Infinity Net recalls that ‘I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely upon the form before me.

The pumpkin sculptures integrate many key aspects of Kusama’s practice: the repeating pattern of dots, connotations of growth and fertility and a palette of singular vibrancy. It was in early childhood that Kusama also began to experience the terrifying hallucinations that left her ‘dazzled and dumbfounded’ by repeating patterns that engulfed her field of vision, a process she referred to as obliteration. That and its solid spiritual balance.’ Works on display include new bronze pumpkin sculptures, painted in a vibrant palette of red, yellow and green, their curvaceous forms adorned with tapering patterns of black dots that create a sophisticated geometry. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. Writing about the significance of pumpkins in her 2011 book Infinity Net: the Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, the artist notes: ‘It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. The artist’s family cultivated plant seeds in Matsumoto, and she was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home. The pumpkin form has been a recurring motif in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s.

Joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual, the My Eternal Soul paintings abound with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots for which the artist is synonymous, to offer impressions of worlds at once microscopic and macroscopic.

THE OBLITERATION ROOM YAYOI KUSAMA SERIES

Paintings from the artist’s celebrated, ongoing My Eternal Soul series are on view at Gallery II, Wharf Road. Continuing to address the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, the new works in this exhibition are testament to an artist at the height of her powers as she approaches her 90th birthday.

Throughout her career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences.

The obliteration room yayoi kusama