Ludwig x Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (*1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is one of the most renowned artists of our time. The exhibition takes visitors on a fascinating journey through Kusama’s entire oeuvre. More than three hundred works will be featured.

Kusama’s practice revolves around nature and its state of constant transformation, of becoming and decay, and the boundlessness of the universe, in which everything that exists eventually perishes. The polka dot pattern used by the artist to cover objects and people is as much an expression of this worldview as her Infinity Mirror Rooms.

After growing up in the confines of rural, patriarchal postwar Japan, Kusama fled to New York City in the late 1950s, finding herself in the midst of the Flower Power movement and anti–Vietnam War protests. Using art as a means of activism, she hit the headlines with provocative happenings. Returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama began to work through her existential anxieties, often in visceral novels and poems. Her powerful mature work, in turn, contains vibrant, richly colored cycles of paintings.