Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Matsumoto, Japan
2018
March 3–July 22, 2018
A major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama’s work was presented in the artist’s hometown of Matsumoto. Featuring 180 works spanning different media and dating from the 1930s to the present day, Yayoi Kusama: All About My Love was the artist’s fourth and largest show to date at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art. A solo exhibition by Kusama marked the museum’s inauguration in 2002, and was followed by two further shows—The Place for My Soul in 2005, and Eternity of Eternal Eternity in 2012. An installation by the artist titled The Place for My Soul has been on permanent display at the museum since it opened.
Kusama was born and spent the early part of her life in Matsumoto in Japan’s Nagano prefecture, where her parents owned a seed nursery. It was there that she first created the distinctive motifs of dots and netlike patterns which have remained consistent throughout her career. As the artist recalls in her autobiography, Infinity Net, “Deep in the mountains of Nagano, working with letter-size sheets of white paper, I had found my own unique method of expression: ink paintings featuring accumulations of tiny dots and pen drawings of endless and unbroken chains of graded cellular forms or peculiar structures that resembled magnified sections of plant stalks.”
Kusama moved to New York in 1958, aged twenty-nine, and spent seventeen years there before returning permanently to Japan in 1975. The artist is based in Tokyo, where the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in October 2017 with the inaugural exhibition Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art, featuring her recent series of paintings My Eternal Soul. The exhibition was on view through February 25, 2018.