Berlin’s Gropius Bau is hosting “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective”, the Japanese artist’s first museum retrospective in Germany and the most comprehensive in Europe to date. The show unfolds across almost 3000 square metres and features nearly 300 works from the last 80 years of the artist’s career. The retrospective is subtitled “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe”, which is also the title of the opening monumental installation in the Gropius Bau’s atrium, featuring a sea of colourful, large-scale inflatable tentacles, the highest of them being 11 metres.
It was there, in the midst of this dreamy landscape, that the press conference opening the exhibition was held back in April 2021. Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau and curator of the show, gave an introduction to the exhbition, followed by a short tour highlighting some of the pivotal works on display. This was followed by an interesting Q&A session with her and Thomas Oberender, Director of the Berliner Festspiele. Unfortunately, the conference was in German, with live English translations that couldn’t be really heard clearly. This prevented the English-speaking visitor from actually taking away much of what was said, but luckily the exhibition tour itself was all conducted in English. There is a recording of said conferencee online in the Gropius Bau press section, which allows for a better understanding of certain aspects of the exhibition.
There is also an in-depth digital guide, which includes quotes from the artist and more insights into her life, career and works on show.
Opening the retrospecticve is “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe”, an immersive installation in the large atrium of the Gropius Bau that displays the iconic fantasy of Yayoi Kusama’s work. Entering her exhibition in person through this sort of Alice’s Wonderland must be a wonderful experience. Closing my eyes, I can just picture the immense, dotted tentacles in pink neon colour surrounding me as if walking amongst corals under the sea. The installation lends itself well as a portal into Yayoi Kusama’s world and psyche, which find complete expression through the chronological presentation in the museum.
Following Rosenthal’s steps, we go through the atrium and into a section displaying early drawings from the 1940s up to today. As Rosenthal points out, the interesting and unique aspect of this retrospective is that it recreates eight of Kusama’s past exhibitions, showing visitors how the artist has hung and presented her work in the past, from performance, to painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The show also includes some archival materials and films she made over the last 80 years.
Born in 1929, Yayoi Kusama started exhibiting early on in her career, and was always deeply engaged with the act of curating. It is this aspect of her persona that has also contributed to the curation of the Gropius Bau retrospective, which forms a chronological presentation of her oeuvre. The exhibition starts with a show she presented in her hometown of Matsumoto in 1952, titled “Yayoi Kusama Exhibition and Yayoi Kusama Recent Works”. Here she presented 270 paintings, in a way that already displayed the immersive element in her practice. Rosenthal pointed out how she engaged with botanical motifs, which would become a staple in her oeuvre, and how her early two-dimensional work is deeply connected to her later and present ones.
There is a focus on the artist’s work in Europe and Germany at the Gropius Bau, which identifies this retrospective as somehow uniquely European. Kusama’s first show in Germany took place in Leverkusen in 1960, as part of the group exhibition “Monochrome Malerei” (Monochrome Painting) at the Museum Morsbroich. In 1966, Kusama staged the “Driving Image Show”, which she first presented in New York in 1964. The show was her first real engagement with merging the surrounding environment with her own work to create an immersive experience.
The 1966 edition in Essen, Germany, of which part is presented at the Gropius Bau, included some human figures (painted mannequins) displaying the artist’s iconinc Infinity Nets pattern. The Infinity, as Rosenthal said, is overgrowing, ‘eating up’ the furniture and all objects within the space. As quoted in the digital guide to the exhibition, Kusama wrote in her 2002 autobiography about the Infinity Nets:
My desire was to predict and measure he infinity of the unbounded universe, from my position in it, with dots—an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net.
The 1960s seem to have been a period of time the artist spent working between New York and Germany. She herself, as the curator explains, has said that her time in Germany was a key moment in the shaping of her practice. While she was staging her famous naked performances in the mid to late Sixties in New York, she also realised one of her first naked festivals in Europe, in The Netherlands. An archival film shows Kusama inside the work, being part of it herself, smoking a dotted cigarette that sits on the ashtray in the installation.
In 1963, Kusama opened “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” in New York, her first ever environment. Visitors entered through a narrow, dark corridor that merged into a room containing a large rowing boat covered with phallic objects, which became known as her Accumulations. As Rosenthal explains, Kusama was interested in merging with her works. She often placed herself into her installations, suggesting a will to become one with the work. There is a very close connection between the body and the scultpures in the artist’s work, as can be seen in the large-scale prints of her installation works at Gropius Bau. Her first Infinity Mirror Room is recreated using such prints, showing the phallic objects presented in her New York boat, painted white with red polka dots.
“Floor Show – Phallic Field” was presented in New York in 1965 and comprised a mirrored room of around 25 sqm, with phallic forms of red and white fabric decorated with polka-dots. As shown in one of the most famous images of herself, the artist was present in the installation, wearing a tight red suit. Kusama once said: “Become one with eternity. Obliterate your personality, become part of the environment, forget yourself.” She was a precursor of the selfie-culture that permeates today’s society. The polka-dot would become her signature pattern, and was also already present in her own fashion designs in the 1960s-70s.
The next environment we visit is another Inifinity Room, entirely painted in yellow and decorated floor-to-ceiling with black polka-dots, with a square mirrored room in the middle, which gives more depth to the environment and heigthens the feeling of disorientation. Looking through a small window in the mirror cube, we see a mirrored room with small to large yellow pumpkins with black polka dots. This represents the work Kusama showed in 1993 at the Venice Biennale.
The construction of a parallel world has been at the centre of Kusama’s practice ever since the 1960s, as also evident in the last reconstruction at the Gropius Bau, which offers a glimpse of Kusama’s later exhibition Encounter of Souls (1983), mounted at Jardin de Luseine in Tokyo. Here Kusama finally created what Rosenthal terms a “Kusama world” for her audience, “translating her own experience and perception of the world to implicate the body and experience of the viewer; obliterating herself first and then, by extension, others.” The show happened roughly ten years after she returned to Japan from New York. At the Gropius Bau, she presents what would have been the first room of that exhibition and it shows how she placed her work everywhere, and how there was a return to painting.
Finally, we arrive into her new Infinity Room specially created for the Gropius Bau. The title of the room is “The Eternal Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminated the Quest for Truth”. Kusama here finds for the first time a new form within an Inifinity Mirror Room. Floating light balls create an infinite universe of colourful polka dots when viewed through the mirrors, as if they were stars, which for her stand as human beings. She once wrote in her Open Letter to My Hero, Richard M. Nixon (1968):
Our earth is like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb full of hatred and strife amid peaceful, silent spheres. Let’s you and I change all that and make this world a new Garden of Eden…
Next, we move into the last room of the exhibition, covered with over 50 paintings from the early 2000s onwards. Since the early 2000s, as Rosenthal points out, Kusama has increasingly shifted her focus back to painting, a practice that has its roots in her two-dimensional works of 1952 onwards. Her recent painting practice reached a climax in 2009 with her ongoing series entitled My Eternal Soul, in which she creates an immersive experience using her paintings. In this final room are some of her most recent ones dating from just a few months before the show opened.
Kusama contributed a message to her audience for her show “A Bouquet of Love I saw in the Universe”, which was read at the beginning of the press conference, and offers an honest glimpse into the artist’s heart and psyche:
I have devoted my entire life to painting and creating, putting it all on the line each day as I rise to the challenge of art. My art, which is everything to me, is ever aflame with infinite love for the universe and this wonderful fire still burns. To flash through time unto death and then to live on forever, a paean to beautiful love for the glory of humankind. Such is the highest aspiration of my art. Having offered up heart and soul to the universe, devoted to this mystery of artistic creation and mindful of all that is here in this very moment… I invite you to stop, and see for yourselves.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective. A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on show from 22 April to 4 August 2021 at Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany.