DESCRIPTION

The newest book from the internationally celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama presents her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor.

“My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi Kusama

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Kusama has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements such as dots to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural installation of pumpkins, a trio of towering, colorful flower sculptures, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers is a vivid document with varying perspectives that echo Kusama’s own.

New scholarship by Robert Slifkin considers how Kusama innovates and complicates art-historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

Dimensions: 8 × 10 in | 20.3 × 25.4 cm
Pages: 168

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s (b. 1929) work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career encompasses paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Robert Slifkin

Robert Slifkin is an associate professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War and Peace, 1945–1975 (2019) and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (2013), which was awarded the Phillips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such magazines and journals as Artforum, Art in America, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.

Lynn Zelevansky

Lynn Zelevansky is an art historian, curator, and writer based in New York. From 2009 through 2017, she was the Henry J. Heinz ll Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. From 1995 to 2009, she held several positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ending her tenure as Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art. From 1986 to 1995, she worked as a curatorial assistant in the Painting and Sculpture Department at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.