Yayoi Kusama

A major museum retrospective of Yayoi Kusama's work traveled through Europe and to the United States in 2011–2012. The exhibition surveyed the full range of the artist's career, including early paintings made prior to Kusama's move to New York in 1957 to soft sculptures, Infinity Net paintings, mirrored infinity rooms, and the series of works begun in 2009 titled My Eternal Soul. Initially presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the exhibition travelled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

"The first works we see are rather beautiful, surreal watercolours from the 1950s, which occasionally echo Klee and Miró," wrote Mark Hudson in a review of the exhibition at Tate Modern forThe Telegraph; in the Infinity Net paintings, Hudson continues, "endlessly repeated semicircular brushstrokes are covered in veils of thinner paint, creating a weblike effect which extends Pollock's idea of the 'all over' composition, with the sense that we are seeing just a fragment of a potentially endless work." For Holland Cotter, who wrote about the final presentation of the retrospective at The Whitney Museum of American Art forThe New York Times, "there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment . . . Her Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation sculptures are deservedly classics of global stature; her Japanese work of the 1940s and early 1970s are treasures still underknown."