Yayoi Kusama

The most comprehensive book devoted to the incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in 1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that forged a new visual vocabulary—the Net paintings, which were composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973 she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today. Since then, she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this book—created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo studio—the breadth and import of this watershed artist’s career are considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist’s extensive archive that have never been seen before. The publication is timed to coincide with the artist’s major touring retrospective, which makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton.