On the death of the artist Yayoi Kusama: Love is in every point

Numerous exhibitions have been dedicated to her from Melbourne to Kazakhstan to Berlin. Young people in particular love to photograph themselves among their polka-dot installations and yellow-black pumpkin sculptures. Social media is full of these selfies. There are even Instagram filters that put Kusama dots on faces.

Yayoi Kusama, who had been living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital since 1977, created her own universe in which not only she but many found a bit of freedom. Art was her lifesaver. She created sculptures daily, drew, wrote novels and poems, and composed music.

When she wasn’t working, her thoughts could become quite dark, she, who had suffered from depression and hallucinations since childhood, often said. She would continue to work even if no one saw her work. Until the last day. That’s how it happened now. Yayoi Kusama died in a hospital in Tokyo on August 14th.

Kusama created her own universe

Kusama painted his first dots as a child. With your fingers. Born in 1929 in the small Japanese town of Matsumoto, she grew up in an authoritarian household with a strict mother in whose environment she was unable to develop. When she was about ten years old, she had hallucinations for the first time, seeing dots, plants and web patterns superimposed over everything. She was afraid of dissolving into it. The point in her art would remain both healing and threatening at the same time.

In 1958, Kusama escaped his mother’s clutches and moved to the USA. First she shook up the New York scene. She arrived there during the flower power era. Issues such as sexual liberation and protesting the Vietnam War were important to Kusama, who often said that she had been interested in politics as a teenager in Japan. Their “Anatomic Explosions” deliberately took place in symbolically charged locations: including Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge and in front of the UN headquarters. Naked participants appeared and painted their bodies with dots.

Kusama organized more than 70 happenings in New York in the 1960s. She also created colorful phallic installations such as “Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field”. Her “Infinity Net” paintings and “Soft Sculptures” also quickly became successful. She even came up with many of these ideas a little earlier than her male colleagues, who also took up some of them.

Kusama became a pioneer and initiator of the Pop Art movement. From 1969 she published an artist magazine and called it “Orgy”. It also gained influence in Europe. This was an unusual career for a woman in the 1960s.

Kusama just covered everything with her dots. Sculptures, clothes, pictures, posters, exhibition spaces, landscapes, animals, people and plants. A photograph from the 1960s shows her riding a horse painted with spots, like Pippi Longstocking, only much more serious. Kusama painted her dots by hand, cut them out of various materials, or created them using mirrors and light. And she got other people to paint dots on each other.

For Kusama there was a whole philosophy behind the point. Here the separation between the individual and the environment dissolves. The dot symbolizes the break with the grid and stands for liberation, community, cohesion and love. “For the girl with the polka dots, all polka dots are the same; no polka dot is better than another,” Kusama wrote in an invitation to one of her happenings in New York in the 1960s.

Decades later, Stephanie Rosenthal praised her art as progressive and popular at the same time on the occasion of Kusama’s 2021 exhibition. The then head of the Gropius Bau had brought Kusama to Berlin. Until then, her art had never been seen on a larger scale in Germany.

Rosenthal reconstructed eight of Kusama’s exhibitions from 1952 to 1983, but also showed new paintings, which was particularly important to Kusama. The show was a huge success. Yayoi’s points were present throughout the city. Even the trees wore polka dots.

The Kusama hype became global when the luxury brand Louis Vuitton launched a huge campaign with the artist in 2023. An inflatable Kusama figure floated above the Vuitton store on the Champs-Élysées and the facade had dots on it. At Piccadilly Circus in London you could see her huge portrait wearing a black and yellow patterned pumpkin helmet. Their points were also emblazoned on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles or on billboards in China and Korea. Then there is the fashion: bags, silk scarves, sneakers and more. An invasion of dots.

The Cologne Museum Ludwig celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an elaborately staged Kusama retrospective, which came from Basel and will move on to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September. The Cologne exhibition ended these days and broke visitor records. Kusama’s very early works, such as the 1963 installation “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show,” were also exhibited in Cologne.

On the museum’s roof terrace, Kusama’s colorfully painted bronze flowers glowed in the summer heat, with Cologne Cathedral in the background. These giant flowers were also on display in the Botanical Garden in Central Park in New York during the pandemic. Art has always given Kusama strength in her life. She passed this power on to the world in many ways.