Yayoi Kusama

Central to Yayoi Kusama's work since the late-1950s has been a proliferating circular motif - either a polka dot or, conversely, the negative space seen when a looped mark is applied to a surface - which the artist first experienced during childhood hallucinations and by which she has been obsessed ever since. Spilling across canvases, sculptures and installations, sometimes shop mannequins, even the artist's body and clothing she has designed, these dots and whorls vary in tone and character from strident chromatic contrasts to delicate filigrees of white-on-white.

En masse Kusama's work is beautiful but overwhelming, the product of a self-described obsession that extends to food and sex - Kusama has also employed stuffed-fabric phallic forms and pasta to cover sculptural objects and installations. If Kusama's art can be seen as a sublimation of those obsessions - and the artist certainly regards her work not just as cathartic but life-saving - it nonetheless remains unsettling due to its vigorous, mutating nature. During her six-decade career, Kusama's work has shown affinities with movements such as Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Performance Art, Minimalism and Feminist Art, as well as current trends in installation art. She is also known as a novelist, filmmaker and fashion designer. And yet, hers is an art of absolute singularity. Each creative act starts with a single gesture that, when multiplied and sent out into the world, reveals the potency of endless variation.

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Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, Kusama now lives and works in Tokyo. Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and has been the subject of many major international museum exhibitions, including shows at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2008), National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan) (2004-2005), Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo (2004), Le Consortium, Dijon (touring France, Denmark, Korea) (2001-2002), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1998), Walker Art Center (1998-99) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1998-99). In 2006, she was awarded the 18th annual Praemium Imperiale Award for painting.

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