Yayoi Kusama at the Centre Pompidou

Opening next Monday is the first ever French retrospective devoted to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose work concentrates on pattern and repetition, particularly a trademark polka-dot motif, and which maintains a considerable influence on contemporary art, from Andy Warhol to Mike Kelley. The French manifestation of this major travelling exhibition puts emphasis on Kusama’s sculpture and her experiments with colour represented by her monochromes. It will map the key points in the artist’s career, illustrating the protean nature (painting, sculpture, performance, environments…) of her work that the artist herself describes as ‘obsessional’. This characteristic is strongly connected to a childhood memory, a hallucination that stands at the root of her recurrent motif of the dot. “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots,” she has said. After an introductory section featuring her early, small-format works, notably a number of watercolours never yet seen in Europe, marked by a certain Surrealist influence, the exhibition falls into two major periods: exile in New York, and the return to Japan after 1973.
Mon 10 Oct-9 Jan 2012. 11am-9pm, closed Tue.
Centre Pompidou, rue Beaubourg, 4th. M° Hôtel de Ville or Rambuteau. www.centrepompidou.fr