Yayoi Kusama

"Staying in Japan was out of the question. My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice ... For art like mine – art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die – this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, a wider world."
Yayoi Kusama, quoted by essayist Mignon Nixon in D.A.P./Tate's major 2012 exhibition catalog, Yayoi Kusama.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

YAYOI KUSAMA
Edited by Frances Morris. Text by Jo Applin, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Midori Yamamura.
D.A.P./TATE
ISBN: 9781935202813 | US $49.95
Pub Date: 2/29/2012
Active | In stock

YAYOI KUSAMA: LEWIS CARROLL'S ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND: WITH ARTWORK BY YAYOI KUSAMA
PENGUIN GLOBAL
ISBN: 9780141197302 | US $35.00
Pub Date: --
Active | Limited quantity

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

YAYOI KUSAMA
Essays by Karola Grässlin and Jan Verwoert.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883758299 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2004
Out of print | Not available

LOVE FOREVER: YAYOI KUSAMA, 1958-1968
Texts by Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Lynn Zelevansky
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
ISBN: 9780875871813 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 4/2/1998
Out of print | Not available

FROM THE BLOG

At First Sight: Yayoi Kusama

D.A.P. Publishing is pleased to have published Yayoi Kusama, the definitive exhibition catalog published to accompany the Whitney Museum of American Art's current retrospective of the artist's work, on view through September 30 and reviewed in the July 13 issue of The New York Times. Please continue to our blog to see spreads from the book.
read the full post

Yayoi Kusama

Featured image, a 1965 installation view of "Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli's Field," Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, is reproduced from Yayoi Kusama.

In her catalog essay in the same volume, Jo Applin writes, "Imagine yourself entering a darkened room in which every available surface, wall and object is caught in a web of dots. The ostensibly ordinary domestic room and its contents—animate viewers and inanimate work alike – come together in one collective plane of experience, united by hundreds of polka-dot glow-in-the-dark spots that have been stuck on every object and surface in the installation. Cut loose from the usual order of things, participants in this work find themselves centre stage in a disorienting and decidedly unfamiliar setting. This work seems to require something from its visitors—whether it be their presence, or their participation in an otherwise unscripted scenario. It forces a series of questions: Should you enter the room alone or with a crowd of other people? Is this an environment in which the viewing subject is trapped or set free? Is this a liberating, undifferentiated space of open-ended possibilities and freedom or, as most accounts would have it, an ominous and destabilizing environment marked by dislocation and discomfort, in which one is set adrift, lost in the repetition of the spots, alienated and alone within a private psychological world? Either way the question remains: How are you supposed to act in such a space?"

Yayoi Kusama

Edited by Frances Morris. Text by Jo Applin, Juliet Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Midori Yamamura.
Published by D.A.P./Tate

Accompanying the first major American retrospective exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work, and an exhibition at Tate Modern in London, this volume offers a definitive monograph on Japan's most famous living artist. It features a wealth of works from all periods in Kusama's career, as well as essays by various international curators and critics, discussing Kusama's years in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and the psychoanalytic import of her art. Kusama's originality, innovation and sheer drive to make art have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades, encompassing painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance, installation and even product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York, and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city, becoming close with artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, and influencing many others along the way. It was in these years that Kusama was dubbed "the Polka Dot Princess," for her obsessive use of polka dots in installations and happenings. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition that she has recently achieved. Now in her ninth decade, Kusama's imagination remains fertile and productive, as she continues to devise dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-paints her ongoing series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings.
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She left Japan for New York at the age of 28, following a correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe, and was soon participating in the city's 1960s wave of happenings and avant-garde activities. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and began writing surrealistic novels and poetry. On November 12, 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.

Yayoi Kusama

Essays by Karola Grässlin and Jan Verwoert.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Yayoi Kusama is recognized as one of Japan's best-known, most versatile and internationally successful artists. In the mid-1960s her work was mentioned in the same breath as Minimal art, monochrome painting, and the new trends in Europe, and she was also seen as a forerunner of Pop art. Noted for her soft sculptures and psychedelic installations, Kusama explores themes of love, infinity and obsession throughout her work, from her net-like pattern paintings begun in 1959, to her Pop-inspired love happenings in the 1960s, to installations in which every surface has been compulsively covered in polka-dots, mirrors or stuffed phallus-like protrusions.

Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968

Texts by Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Lynn Zelevansky
Published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Kusama has influenced the direction of American art more than any other post-war Japanese artist. Her work combines elements of expressionism, minimalism, surrealism and pop art.

Yayoi Kusama: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: With Artwork by Yayoi Kusama

Published by Penguin Global

Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at their most creative, to see things the way children do, a central concern of the Alice books, by Lewis Carroll.

The book will be colour illustrated to very high specification, with her images interspersed thoughtfully throughout the text.

Produced in collaboration with the Kusama Studio, Tokyo and Gagosian Gallery.