3 days ago

Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Obliteration Meets the Age of Selfies

Yayoi Kusama is an artist famous for dots, nets, mirrors and pumpkins.

She said making repeating patterns helped her cope with frightening visions.

One artwork covered people and everyday objects with the same pattern, making everything seem connected.

This idea was called self-obliteration, or making the individual self disappear into a larger whole.

Kusama also made many self-portraits, but her art was not mainly about showing off herself.

Instead, she often described human life as one small dot among many others.

The article says people taking selfies in her mirror installations creates an amusing contrast with that idea.

It also recalls how one of her pumpkins floated away at sea before being found.

Key facts

Retrospective: “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now” at M+ Museum brought together nearly eight decades of her practice.
Signature pattern: Kusama’s infinity net consists of repetitive, grid-like patterns that appear across many works.
Self-obliteration installation: The work featured six female mannequins around a dining table, with the pattern covering the scene’s objects and surfaces.
Artistic purpose: Kusama described making repetitive infinity nets as a way of coping with hallucinations that began in childhood.
Infinity Mirrored Room: The installation came to NMACC in Mumbai, but the writer could not see it because tickets were sold out.
Yellow pumpkin: The sculpture installed on Japan’s Naoshima island in 1994 was swept away by Typhoon Lupit in 2021 and later recovered from the sea.

indianexpress.com · 3 days ago