Now open at the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo – Spirits of Aggregation

First produced in 1961, Yayoi Kusama’s Accumulation or Aggregation is a series of works that consist of repeated identical motifs. This body of art began with two-dimensional collages, using everyday objects such as stickers, before extending into the medium of soft sculpture – domestic objects, including furniture, covered with proliferations of sewn, stuffed fabric phalli. Since then, Kusama has continued to create various types of Accumulation pieces, even today.

On this occasion, Yayoi Kusama Museum will present the very early pieces from the Accumulation series, as well as photographs and documents related to the series’ production. Through these works, the exhibition will feature how Kusama bridged the artistic boundaries between painting and sculpture in order to represent her compulsive obsession with the hallucinations she experienced as a young girl, as well as her neurotic anxieties over sex and her disgust towards industrially-made food stuff.

Dots Obsession, an installation exhibited frequently since the late 1990s and perceived as an accumulation of polka dots and a magnified soft sculpture, will be displayed alongside selected works from Kusama’s latest large canvas series My Eternal Soul - presented as her current manifestations of Accumulation.

Read more

Image: Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation of Letters (detail), 1961

©YAYOI KUSAMA