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拍品專文
Yayoi Kusama is a highly influential artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all demonstrate her preoccupation with repetition, pattern, and accumulation, which she claims has helped to 'obliterate' the debilitating sexual anxieties she has experienced since her youth.
With Georgia O'Keeffe as an early champion of her work, Kusama moved from Japan to New York (via Seattle) in 1958. Early work included her 'Infinity Nets', huge canvases filled with loops of paint and the creation of 'soft sculptures', phallic shaped objects with which she covered mundane objects such as shoes, bags, ladders and boats.
By the mid 1960s, the period from which this group of photographs and ephemera dates, Kusama had begun to stage radical happenings (or 'orgies') in public places such as the Stock Exchange. Her followers, usually recruited through newspaper advertisements, would cavort naked while the artist applied polka dots to their bodies. Kusama's aim was to 'Obliterate Wall Street men with polka dots.' Recent anti-establishment protests, such as those enacted by the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement show just how prescient Kusama's stunts were.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and admitted herself to into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she remains in residence. In the 1970s and 1980s she drifted into semi-obscurity, but interest in her art revived in 1989 when The Center for International Contemporary Art in New York staged a retrospective. The MoMA, New York, followed suit in 1998.
Yayoi Kusama is a delightfully unconventional artist whose influence on the contemporary art scene has been profound. In November 2008, one of her 'Infinity Nets' sold in these rooms for $5.1 million, an auction record for a living female artist. The celebration of her extraordinary talent continues. A major exhibition of her work is currently taking place at Tate Modern in London.
James Golata, the original owner of this superb Archive, was an acolyte of the artist in the 1960s and took part in many of Kusama's New York happenings. His collection of photographs and printed ephemera is extraordinarily rare and probably unique.
With Georgia O'Keeffe as an early champion of her work, Kusama moved from Japan to New York (via Seattle) in 1958. Early work included her 'Infinity Nets', huge canvases filled with loops of paint and the creation of 'soft sculptures', phallic shaped objects with which she covered mundane objects such as shoes, bags, ladders and boats.
By the mid 1960s, the period from which this group of photographs and ephemera dates, Kusama had begun to stage radical happenings (or 'orgies') in public places such as the Stock Exchange. Her followers, usually recruited through newspaper advertisements, would cavort naked while the artist applied polka dots to their bodies. Kusama's aim was to 'Obliterate Wall Street men with polka dots.' Recent anti-establishment protests, such as those enacted by the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement show just how prescient Kusama's stunts were.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and admitted herself to into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she remains in residence. In the 1970s and 1980s she drifted into semi-obscurity, but interest in her art revived in 1989 when The Center for International Contemporary Art in New York staged a retrospective. The MoMA, New York, followed suit in 1998.
Yayoi Kusama is a delightfully unconventional artist whose influence on the contemporary art scene has been profound. In November 2008, one of her 'Infinity Nets' sold in these rooms for $5.1 million, an auction record for a living female artist. The celebration of her extraordinary talent continues. A major exhibition of her work is currently taking place at Tate Modern in London.
James Golata, the original owner of this superb Archive, was an acolyte of the artist in the 1960s and took part in many of Kusama's New York happenings. His collection of photographs and printed ephemera is extraordinarily rare and probably unique.