Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist that was an influential figure in the postwar New York art scene, staging provocative happenings and exhibitions with hallucinatory paintings of loops and dots (and physical representations of the idea of infinity).
She makes works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns.
She has traded on her identity as an ‘outsider’ in many contexts – as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist.