Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers
Yayoi Kusama and Robert Slifkin
“My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi Kusama
One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements—such as dots—to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.
Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural installation of pumpkins, a trio of towering, colorful flower sculptures, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers is a vivid document with varying perspectives that echo Kusama’s own.
New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s (b. 1929) work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.
Lynn Zelevansky is an art historian, curator, and writer based in New York. She is the former Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh as well as curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Robert Slifkin is the Edith Kitzmiller Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art and photography.
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