The first major survey of Yayoi Kusama’s work in Britian
In 2000, the Serpentine presented the first major survey of Yayoi Kusama’s work in Britain. The exhibition included paintings, collages, watercolours, sculptures, documentations of performances and films all of which explored Kusama’s obsession with dots, nets, food and sex.
The centrepiece of the exhibition was a re-interpretation of her 1966 landmark work, The Driving Image in which the surfaces of mannequins and household furnishings are entirely covered in her vibrant signature patterns and posed on a bed of broken macaroni. Other works in the exhibition included a lifesize rowboat and roomsize snake covered in stuffed and painted phallic protrusions, an interactive, inflatable painting and a peep show filled with mirrors that generated an endlessly changing kaleidoscopic lightshow.
As Laura Hoptman wrote in the exhibition guide: In 1964 Kusama was able to realise her dream of a full-blown environment at the Richard Castellane Gallery in New York. Called Driving Image Show, the exhibition consisted of ‘Accumulation’ furniture set up in a living room tableau complete with mannequins covered in dry macaroni, an enormous rowboat encrusted with barnacle like phalli and propped on its stern against the wall, and phallus covered clothes. Although a common strategy for artists of the 1980s and 90s, in 1964, room sized environments where the audience participated in the work of art by walking in to it were exceedingly rare. By all accounts the environment caused a season-long sensation.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama came to international attention in 1960s New York for a wide-ranging creative practice that has encompassed installation, painting, sculpture, fashion design and writing. The artist has been the subject of monographic exhibitions around the world. Since the 1970s Kusama has lived in Tokyo, where she continues to work prolifically and to international acclaim.
