Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is delighted to present YAYOI KUSAMA：RECENT PAINTINGS, a solo exhibition by Yayoi Kusama featuring 15 monochrome paintings from her My Eternal Soul series and a cloud-based sculpture installation consisting pieces of mirror-finished stainless steel three-dimensional pieces.
In 2019, Kusama began working on a group of 100 x 100 cm monochrome canvases that she painted intensively by applying solid black paint on a white background. Unlike other paintings of the same series, the bright and vibrant colors have disappeared. Bold and curly black lines envelop the canvas together with her wealth of varied motifs: eyelets, frontal faces, biomorphic shapes, nets and dots. These new paintings synthesize contrasting concepts and forms of positive and negative spaces, figuration and abstraction, microscopic and macroscopic views of the universe. Created at the tenth year mark of her My Eternal Soul series, they force a review on the way we look at and approach this series.
In the large scale installation “CLOUDS”, stainless steel cloud-like shapes surround the floors of the gallery. They echo, reflect, and complement the lines in her paintings, creating at once an expansive yet immersive atmosphere that allows for floaty imaginations beyond the walls of the gallery. As Yayoi Kusama soldiers on to expand her creative vocabulary, this exhibition in Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is exemplary of her continuous innovation, uncompromising vision and compelling charm to dazzle and captivate the hearts of people all around the world.
About the Artist
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. From her childhood experiences with visual and auditory hallucinations, she started to produce drawings and paintings of nets and polka dots. Through various obsessions, she developed her art philosophy of self-obliteration through compulsive repetition and proliferation of the single motif. Since the early 90’s, she has created outdoor sculptures and large scale installations using inflatables and lights, expanding her prolific world. She has held numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives throughout the world. In 2016, she was bestowed the prestigious “Order of Culture” award in Japan. The Yayoi Kusama Museum dedicated to the artist opened in 2017 in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

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