YAYOI KUSAMA

While “Maison de la Culture du Japon” in Paris is exhibiting her installations, Pièce Unique , who has been presenting Kusama’s works since 1998, has offered the artist the two spaces of the gallery.

Kusama has chosen to create rue Jacques Callot a completely new work
and to present at Pièce Unique Variations, 26 rue Mazarine, a selection of more or less recent works (sculptures and paintings) allowing the public to get an exhaustive panorama of her works.

Internationally acclaimed, Kusama holds since the 60’s a major place on the scene of Contemporary Art. Born in 1929 in Nagano, she installs in New York in 1958 where she frequents Donald Judd and Franck Stella. The artist, quickly assimilated to the New Yorker avant-garde, appears like a precursor of pop’art and environmental art. She joins, in Europe at the end of the 60’s, the Nul and Zero group with Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein and exhibits her works in museums and galleries in the Netherlands and in Italy.

Kusama’s works, which she qualifies “obsessionnal”, is based on repetitions and multiplications of signs: as a child, she remembers having had the hallucinatory vision of a pea-shaped motif decorating a tablecloth at home being repeated throughout the room. Since then, her universe and her installations are inhabited by a multitude of colored peas and also mirrors and phallic shapes repeated to infinity: one remembers the “Repetitive-vision, Phallus-boat” shown at the gallery in March 2000.

Mostly known for her sculptures and paintings, Kusama has also been involved in fashion, movies and has published several poems and novels.