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Polka Dots Are a Way to Infinity: Yayoi Kusama

In the next year we'll be hearing a lot about Yayoi Kusama.  The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who Yoko Ono sites as an influence, was born in Japan in 1929 and at the age of ten started to paint her infamous polka-dots and net motifs. In a Yayoi Kusama universe things would look like what the world would look like if an obsessive compulsive God on a mushroom trip created it.  Yayoi Kusama says about polk-dots: "...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." Kusama has also published many books including Manhattan Suicide Addict - a photographic and typographic treatise on the isolation of exile through the pure formation of art.   On view now at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid many of Yayoi Kusama's most personal works on view until September. The exhibition will then move to the Centre Pompidou in París, then to the Tate in London, and finally to the Whitney in New York.  www.museoreinasofia.es

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre