After a year of world domination—having taken three of the top five spots in the most visited contemporary art shows of 2014—the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is due to bring her popular polka dot art to northern Europe. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark will host “the first Kusama retrospective in Scandinavia,” says Marie Laurberg, the curator of the show.
Yayoi Kusama: Towards Infinity (17 September-24 January 2016) will display works that have “rarely or never been shown since [Kusama] first made them”. During Laurberg’s recent stay at the artist’s studio in Tokyo they “found an [unopened] package containing a group of very beautiful, early drawings and pastels”. Kusama had taken these with her when she left Japan for New York in the 1950s and had then packed them up on her return home 20 years later. The sealed package was not opened until Laurberg’s visit and the unearthed works will allow visitors to the exhibition to see early versions of ideas and motifs that are “continuously recreated and developed in later work”.
The exhibition will also be the first to take a serious look at the artist’s interest in fashion. It will include early, “very rare, original designs” procured from galleries and private collections in Japan and the US. “It was quite amazing to find that some of them actually still existed”, Laurberg says. Kusama began designing fashion items in the 1960s that were intended for sale as well as to be used as costumes for the “happenings” she organised at the time, which included “sex orgies and political protests”.
Laurberg feels that the octogenarian Kusama is now at the “top of her career [and] deserves all the attention she gets”. Another Kusama retrospective, Infinite Obsession, was seen by over two million people in Central and South America last year. Laurberg is hopeful that the exhibition will be popular but if “two million visitors [came to the] Louisiana, the museum would literally be obliterated”. She instead hopes that it is the visitors that will be “obliterated by dots”.
Yayoi Kusama: Towards Infinity is supported by the C.L. David Foundation and Collection, and travels to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Helsinki Art Museum, Finland.
