Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) - Creativity + Mental Health

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) uses art to curb the anguish of her hallucinations. She seeks to immerse her spectators in the infinite exuberance of the colourful forms of her childhood.

Yayoi Kusama was born into a conservative and prosperous family. At the age of 10, she began to suffer from hallucinations. She used drawing as a means of navigating her fear of disintegration at the hands of an invisible world threatening to spread and swallow her up. From the very beginning, her mental illness took center stage in her creative process.

She studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where she was introduced to Nihonga painting. In the 1950s, she explored more abstract forms, which were well received by both the artistic and psychiatric communities.

The subjects of her childhood drawings (the cosmos, the heart, flowers…) are repeated in an infinite and uniform pattern.

In the late 1950s, she moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League. It was during this time that she created her Infinity Net series, whose larger and larger compositions, exhibited for the first time at the Brata Gallery in 1959, seem to submerge the viewer in a network of dots and lines. According to critic Lucy Lippard*, this work placed her within the Eccentric Abstraction movement, which is defined by a rejection of strict minimalism, and the inclusion of emotion, sensuality, and the use of synthetic materials endowed with organic shapes and a certain sexual resonance.

YAYOI KUSAMA 1960 WHITE.NO.28' Painted in 1960, White No. 28 is an early work in Kusama’s groundbreaking series of Infinity Nets, and dates to a formative period in the artist’s career when she first developed the motifs and themes that would come to define her oeuvre.