Edited with text by Mika Yoshitake. Foreword and interview by Melissa Chiu. Text by Alexander Dumbadze, Gloria Sutton. Chronology by Miwako Tezuka. Annotated bibliography by Alex Jones.
The first and only comprehensive volume exploring the artist’s best-known and most spectacular series
Published with Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
This book presents world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s most famous series, the Infinity Mirror Rooms, and charts its influence on the course of contemporary art for over 50 years. Kusama’s rooms are filled with multicolored lights that reflect endlessly. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. This definitive publication traces these installations and reveals how, over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities, from Kusama’s “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent atmospheres, this publication historicizes her pioneering work amid today’s renewed interest in experiential practices. Generously illustrated, this book invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career. Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has worked not only in sculpture and installation but also painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction and other arts. In her early career in Japan, she produced mostly works on paper. With her late-1950s move to New York City, she joined the ranks of the avant-garde, working in soft sculpture and influencing the likes of Warhol and Oldenburg. At this time, she was also involved with happenings and other performance-oriented works and began to deploy her signature dots. Her work fell into relative obscurity after her return to Japan in 1973, but a subsequent revival of interest in the 1980s elevated her work to the canonical status that it still enjoys today.
In the space of two days, we have learned of the loss of two irreplaceable, unstoppable giants—both women who eclipsed everyone and everything that came between themselves and the sun. First, American musician and icon Dolly Parton, whose death, at age 80, was announced Tuesday, August 25. And now, Japanese visionary artist Yayoi Kusama, whose death, at 97, was announced Wednesday, August 26. Pictured here, Kusama’s Peep Show or Endless Love Show installed at Castellane Gallery, New York, in 1966. “This was the materialization of a state of rapture I myself had experienced,” Kusama wrote of a later iteration of this piece, “in which my spirit was whisked away to wander the border between life and death.… I intended it as an electric monument to love itself.… This was my living, breathing manifesto of Love. Thousands of illuminated colors blinking at the speed of light—isn’t this the very illusion of Life in our transient world?” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.75 x 10.75 in. / 224 pgs / 212 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $77 GBP £47.00 ISBN: 9781636811215 PUBLISHER: DelMonico Books AVAILABLE: 10/31/2023 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by DelMonico Books. Edited with text by Mika Yoshitake. Foreword and interview by Melissa Chiu. Text by Alexander Dumbadze, Gloria Sutton. Chronology by Miwako Tezuka. Annotated bibliography by Alex Jones.
The first and only comprehensive volume exploring the artist’s best-known and most spectacular series
Published with Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
This book presents world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s most famous series, the Infinity Mirror Rooms, and charts its influence on the course of contemporary art for over 50 years.
Kusama’s rooms are filled with multicolored lights that reflect endlessly. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. This definitive publication traces these installations and reveals how, over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities, from Kusama’s “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent atmospheres, this publication historicizes her pioneering work amid today’s renewed interest in experiential practices. Generously illustrated, this book invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career.
Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has worked not only in sculpture and installation but also painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction and other arts. In her early career in Japan, she produced mostly works on paper. With her late-1950s move to New York City, she joined the ranks of the avant-garde, working in soft sculpture and influencing the likes of Warhol and Oldenburg. At this time, she was also involved with happenings and other performance-oriented works and began to deploy her signature dots. Her work fell into relative obscurity after her return to Japan in 1973, but a subsequent revival of interest in the 1980s elevated her work to the canonical status that it still enjoys today.
