Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective / Hella Jongerius: Woven Cosmos

This April, Berlin’s Gropius Bau opens major exhibitions by two visionary women who are among the most innovative creative figures of our time. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, the first large-scale retrospective in Germany of world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), will open doors on April 23, 2021. Woven Cosmos, opening April 29, 2021 is an evolving participatory exhibition by legendary Berlin-based industrial designer Hella Jongerius, who has been working onsite since autumn 2020. The Gropius Bau presents two exhibitions by radical individuals who forged their own paths within the realms of visual art, fashion and design.

Yayoi Kusama’s institutional retrospective unfolds across almost 3000 square meters and features nearly 300 works from the last 80 years. A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe includes gouaches on paper, accumulative sculptures, happenings, and fashion work, culminating in her recent paintings and productions. Kusama’s new site-specific installation is a sea of large-scale inflatable tentacles. The immersive work, made uniquely for the Gropius Bau’s vast historic atrium, will be shown alongside a reconstruction of the artist’s first Infinity Mirror Room, presented in New York in 1965. This exhibition will feature eight additional exhibition reconstructions from 1952 to 1983, accompanied by detailed archival material.

The exhibition lends a new perspective on the story of Kusama’s exhibitions and her art-historical legacy in Europe. An extensive catalogue collates new discoveries of Kusama’s accomplishments in fashion, film, art, marketing and publishing in eleven essays by different art historians, curators and researchers.

Over three decades, the industrial designer and artist Hella Jongerius has engaged with urgent topics such as sustainable innovation, responsible production and societal regeneration. With the solo exhibition Woven Cosmos, the Gropius Bau presents to a broad public this unique and path-breaking figure from the realm of design and applied arts.

Trained as an industrial designer, Jongerius asks essential questions such as: how can we design a sustainable future through traditional crafts? How can objects be used to heal, inspire and connect? Often focussing on the cultural, economic, technical and philosophical aspects of textiles and weaving, Jongerius’s installations emphasize open-ended process over fixed result.

Arising from a durational engagement with the Gropius Bau space that began in autumn 2020, Jongerius is developing a number of installations that fill the rooms of the Gropius Bau, including a loom for three-dimensional weaving, a synergetic method for spinning yarn and woven structures proposed as architectural elements. Jongerius will be working in the exhibition spaces every day.

Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.
Woven Cosmos is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal with Clara Meister in cooperation with Studio Hella Jongerius.