Yayoi Kusama

This exhibition was the first major survey of Yayoi Kusama’s work in Britain.

This exhibition included paintings, collages, watercolours, sculptures, documentation of performances and films, all of which explored Kusama’s obsessions with dots, nets, food and sex. The show also presented examples of the artist’s precedent-setting environmental installations, which are suggestive of three-dimensional paintings.

The centrepiece of the survey, however, was a re-interpretation of Kusama’s 1966 landmark work, The Driving Image, in which the surfaces of mannequins and household furnishings were entirely covered in her painted, vibrant signature patterns and placed on a bed of broken macaroni. Other works in the exhibition included a life-size rowboat, a room-size snake covered in stuffed and painted phallic protrusions and an interactive, inflatable painting.