#Obliteration room yayoi kusama series

Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano. 'I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.' Biography Early life: 1929–1949 'I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art,' she told an interviewer in 2012. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. Kusama has continued to create art in various museums around the world, from the 1950s through the 2020s. She experienced a period in the 70s during which her work was largely forgotten, but a revival of interest in the 1980's brought her art back into public view.

#Obliteration room yayoi kusama series

Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. She was inspired by American Abstract impressionism. Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts for a year in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Watch the time-lapse video above and see a few before-and-after shots of the room below.Yayoi Kusama ( 草間彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. It’s a tough but fun choice: where exactly to place those stickers? On the wall, on a chair, on a bicycle, a table? In five weeks, The Obliteration Room has completely transformed from a blank canvas to a colour explosion, and we captured it all on camera. Visitors leaving the exhibition are invited to place brightly coloured polka dot stickers anywhere they choose in the room. Before the exhibition opened, all of these objects were painted white to make the eventual transformation even more remarkable.

The room recreates a domestic setting – the AGO’s set-up is complete with couch, dining room table and cutlery, bookshelves, a computer, bowls of fruit, and an outdoor area with Muskoka chairs, a fire pit, and a bicycle. Conceived by the artist, The Obliteration Room offers an invitation for visitors to collectively participate in “obliterating” an environment by covering it in colourful dots.

Kusama is known for her obsession with dots. And every person who has come through the exhibition has left their mark in The Obliteration Room. It feels like it just arrived in Toronto, but Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrorshas now been open to the public for over a month.