In 1966, Yayoi Kusama appeared at the Venice Biennale with 1,500 mirrored plastic spheres and spread them across the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion. She had not been formally invited to exhibit. The work was “Narcissus Garden,” and Kusama began offering individual spheres to visitors for 1,200 lire, about $2 at the time, until Biennale officials stopped the sales.
The gesture turned repetition into spectacle and spectacle into commerce. An apparently endless field of identical objects could, one by one, be bought and carried away. Sixty years later, the work has acquired another resonance.
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on Aug. 14 at 97. The museum that bears her name said she continued painting until her final days. For an artist whose work repeatedly returned to accumulation, repetition and infinity, death imposes a blunt condition.
Her work, however, is on display. Less than a month after Kusama’s death, on Sept. 11, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam unveiled a Kusama retrospective spanning more than 70 years, from early drawings and the radical work of her New York years to recent paintings from her Tokyo studio. The exhibition runs through mid January.
While the timing was accidental, the effect is not. The exhibition had been conceived with Kusama while she was alive and developed in close collaboration with her and her studio. A show planned around a living artist of extraordinary global stature had become, almost overnight, a view of a now-complete body of work.
The work is now complete, and that gives the retrospective an added significance. You are no longer looking at a career still in progress but at the full scope of an artistic life.” Coelewij says the museum chose not to alter the exhibition after Kusama’s death. Her studio continued working with the Stedelijk to realize the plans already made with the artist, and the museum remained faithful to the vision they had developed together.
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