Yayoi Kusama

Explore the world of artist Yayoi Kusama in this lively, interactive lift-the-flap book for children ages 0–3. Pumpkins, polka dots, flowers, and so much more! Yayoi Kusama creates art that's bursting with color and creativity, bringing “never-ending joy” to children. Her playful and vibrant masterpieces are perfect for young artists who love to explore and have fun with colors and shapes. Kusama's radiant world invites young imaginations to run wild, offering endless possibilities for creative expression. With her signature bold patterns, she encourages kids to embrace their own unique artistic voices. The What Artists Make series of lift-the-flap books, geared toward children under the age of three, shares the different ways artists view the world. In each book, one artist’s unique method of making or outlook on creativity is explored through rhythmic sentences and photographs of artworks selected to delight and inspire. Beneath the flap, a short explanation of the artist’s practice provides added context, allowing adults to engage with the art on a deeper level and to share the knowledge with their children.

This special edition featuring a slipcase is available in a limited run of 300 hand-numbered copies. The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor. “My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi Kusama One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements—such as dots—to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural maze of pumpkin walls, a lush garden of towering flowers, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, the result is a book that offers the sense of experiencing the work in person for readers who have not had the chance. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor“My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi KusamaOne of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements—such as dots—to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural installation of pumpkins, a trio of towering, colorful flower sculptures, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers is a vivid document with varying perspectives that echo Kusama’s own. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

The companion to the groundbreaking new retrospective at the Gropius Bau, this publication examines Kusama’s life and work through wholly original insights by leading experts. The book traces the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Europe and Germany in particular. It illuminates Kusama’s commitment to political and social issues in Europe, the US and Japan. A diverse selection of images and archival documents feature alongside texts by authors from different theoretical backgrounds. Essays discuss Kusama’s accomplishments in the worlds of fashion, film, art marketing and publishing. They focus on her engagement with different artistic spheres and offer genre-specific observations about her performances, installations and painting series. As panoramic and fascinating as its subject, this monumental retrospective guides viewers interested in Kusama towards a deeper understanding of her creative trajectory and of the breadth of her extraordinary career.

In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her work and daily life. With a new focus on Kusama’s use of language, this book gives an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other media. Highlighting the importance of language to Kusama, the book draws special attention to the captivating poetic titles of her paintings, such as in I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry collected here touches on Kusama’s personal triumphs and trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art and peace above all else. Centered around EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirrored Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

Avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama’s matchless creativity and originality have been captivating the world since she moved from Matsumoto, her hometown in Nagano, Japan, to the USA in 1958. In the last ten years alone, her retrospective exhibitions in four major European and American museums, including Tate Modern, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, have seen record attendance. Kusama has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. This comprehensive publication, originally published to accompany a sell-out exhibition at Matsumoto City Museum of Art, offers a comprehensive overview of Kusama’s entire career, including works from her youth, when she indulged in drawing in order to escape from her hallucinations; paintings made when she was based in New York, including ‘Infinity Nets’ and ‘Polka Dots’; works from the1980s and 1990s, when she participated in the Venice Biennale; and last but not least, the ongoing large-scale series ‘My Eternal Soul’. The plates are in chronological order and followed by detailed captions.

Kusama's delicate drawings both illustrate and interpret Hans Christian Andersen's taleHans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" (1839), a story about a girl from the sea who followed her dreams and suffered a disastrous fate on land, is known all over the world (particularly in its animated incarnation). But the familiar story is brought to new life in this gorgeous edition, a collaboration between the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and artist Yayoi Kusama. Paired with Hans Christian Andersen's original text, the densely patterned, undulating line drawings of Kusama's Love Forever series (2004-7) conjure up storms in the roiling waves of the ocean, the Little Mermaid's vast underwater kingdom and her longing to live in the human world. Kusama's fertile, endlessly repeating forms are an ideal match for the poetic and disturbing universe evoked in the fairy tale; the result is a true collaboration. Kusama's drawings both illustrate and interpret Andersen's story, bringing it to terrifying life, and Andersen's words lend narrative content to Kusama's landscapes of unblinking eyes, curling tendrils and disembodied profiles. Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) first left Japan at the age of 28, landing in late 1950s New York. Her oeuvre, now spanning more than 50 years, includes painting, performance, installations and environments, sculpture, film, fashion, design and literary work. She was recently named the world's most popular artist, based on annual figures reported by The Art Newspaper for global museum attendance in 2014.

Hi, Konnichiwa is a substantial, brilliant little book that brings together Kusama's vivid imagery throughout the various phases of her work during the course of her long life. Here are her large-scale canvases, environmental sculptures, multi-media installations and self-portraits. Here too are photos of the artist as a child, a young woman in Tokyo and New York and more recently in her studio in Japan. This book is a vital chronicle of all Kusama's creative endeavours, and offers a rare insight into the fevered imagination of a fascinating woman.

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This extraordinary text tells the story of her life and remarkable career in her own words. 'I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.' Infinity Net reveals Yayoi Kusama as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty-stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.