YAYOI KUSAMA
6 April – 16 May 2004
Zacheta National Gallery of Art
pl. Malachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw, Poland
tel. (48) (22) 827 58 54 fax. (48) (22) 827 78 86
Gallery Hours
Tuesdays – Sundays 12 noon – 8 pm
free Thursdays
Press Conference – 6 April, 12 noon
Exhibition opening – 6 April, 19.00
Curator Maria Brewinska
Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is the most outstanding female Japanese contemporary artist. She has achieved world-wide recognition and acclaim on two occasions: the first in New York in the ’60s and the second in the ’90s, when at an already advanced age, she made a triumphant return to the world art scene in an extensive number of exhibitions.
The exhibition at Zacheta attempts to do no more than present a fraction of Kusama’s rich creative output. It will include a selection of her drawings, collages and paintings: from works on paper, such as the early surrealist and abstract images through compositions formed on the basis of the accumulation of elements to the most recent paintings created through the repetition of the same motifs of dots or nets. At the exhibition, it will also be possible to see the artist’s early and recent sculptures based on the phallic motif (the mannequin Phallic Girl, 1965; A Sign Port to Hades, 1976; Silver Night, 1982, Repetitive Vision, Phallus Boat, 2000; Death of Illusion, 2000) as well as the mirrored spaces of her highly significant installations Fireflies on the Water (2000), Dots Obsession (1999) and Chandelier with Pain (2002) which, through their process of mutual reflection, stretch to infinity. Another important installation is Narcissus Garden (1966/2000) composed of silver balls shown for the first time at the 23rd Venice Biennial (1966).
The obsessively recurrent dots motif will also be illustrated by video projections in a room which will itself be arranged in the style of Kusama’s Dots Obsession installation, with numerous coloured dots stuck around the existing space. The video presentation will include the following films: Kusama’s Self Obliteration, 1967, Flower Orgy, 1968, Love in Festival, 1968, Kusama’s Room, 1999, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, 1999, Flower Obsession Gerbera, 1999, Flower Obsession Sunflower, 2000. Within the frame of the exhibition we will also show a series of archive slides of Kusama called Walking Piece (1966), documenting a performance when the artist walked around the streets of New York.
The works gathered for the exhibition come from the collections of the Kusama Studio and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Galerie Piece Unique, Paris; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Puteaux and Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy; Walter&Fabien Gallery, Basel – Zurich; Le Consortium, Dijon; Sammlung Goetz, Monachium; Galerie Bleibtreu, Berlin as well as from a private collection in France.
For press information and illustrations please contact Klaudia Madejska press@zacheta.art.pl