Yayoi Kusama: Flowers that Bloom

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese avant-garde artist known for her obsession with dots, and also for her collaborative designs with Louis Vuitton.  These large sculptures are Fiberglass reinforced plastic, metal and all-weather urethane paint, from her series Flowers that Bloom at Midnight and Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow.  (The one above, for example, is approximately 71 x 71  x 105 inches )

  Kusama, who lives in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, pictured at her recent exhibition at Tate Modern.

-At Sotheby’s Beyond Limits, 9-foot-tall flower

-From her exhibit in Queensland, Australia

-An intro Kusama video re Louis Vuitton

-From the Fractal Art blog

-At Victoria Miro, from Azito, the Japanese online journal of contemporary art.

Kusama was born in Japan and moved to New York in 1957, where she became associated with the abstract expressionist movement. In the sixties, she got into pop art and famously organized a series of “Body Festivals” where she painted nude participants with polka dots. She moved back to Japan in 1973 and has been voluntarily living in a mental hospital since 1977, where she has continued to make visual art and sculpture as well as publish several novels, a poetry collection, and an autobiography. – From New York Fashion’s article on Kusama’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton

Kusama’s website is here.