​From September 23, 2023 to February 25, 2024, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam presents an exhibition devoted to the Dutch years of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. In the period from 1965 to 1970 she exhibited and spent a lot of time in the Netherlands and was part of the vibrant art world there. These are crucial years for the artist, who is now seen worldwide as a superstar and a feminist icon. In the Netherlands of provo, happenings and youth culture, she finds personal and artistic freedom. At the first exhibition in which Kusama participates in the Netherlands, she shows shoes, bags, garments and panels, all covered with countless gold or silver sprayed phallus shapes. It is 1965 and The Hague gallery Orez presents the group exhibition "Facets of contemporary eroticism." This exhibition marks the beginning of the impactful Dutch years of Yayoi Kusama and forms the opening of the exhibition in Schiedam.  

An inventory of works, projects, exhibitions, and happenings by Yayoi Kusama

by Yayoi Kusama and Harrie Verstappen
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on Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is certainly one of the most important post-war and contemporary artists of the moment, with exhibitions all over the world. Her work is not only of historical importance, but it also appeals to a huge, broad and international audience, and escapes almost all art concepts such as ZERO, Minimal Art, Pop Art and Happening. Her work from the sixties, the time she worked in New York, was regularly shown in exhibitions around the world. Little known until now, however, was that her work originated to a large extent in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, and was exhibited there, more often than in New York. A new publication by the 0-INSTITUTE will provide for the first time ever an overview of Kusama's early performative activities, not only recorded by Dutch and Belgian photographers; but staged exclusively for their cameras. Naked and painted with dots, dressed in her own designed "fashion," in the streets and the sex shop, or just in the Dutch meadows. The publication will give a different light to the artistic activities of Kusama, which was already so colorful and cannot be put under a single heading.

Titel: Love Forever or Kusama's story told by Harrie Verstappen 
Editor: Mattijs Visser
Publisher: 0-INSTITUTE / MER. Borgerhoff & Lamberigts
Format: 21 x 14 cm
Pages: 128
Never published images: 70
Price: 19,50€
To order: www.merbooks.be
​Isbn: 9789463930772 (ENG)

22. April - 1. August 2021, ​

Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists. In autumn 2020, the Gropius Bau will devote the first comprehensive retrospective in Germany to Kusama’s work, offering an overview of every creative period from the last seventy years and featuring current paintings as well as a new Infinity Room by the artist.
Yayoi Kusama achieved global recognition for her exploration of repetitive patterns and structures, her signature polka dots and mirrored spaces; in her works, she confronts viewers with realms appearing to extend limitlessly outward and traces the disintegration of the subject in infinity. From the beginnings of her artistic career in New York in the late 1950s, she has combined classical media such as painting, sculpture and drawing with installations, performances and happenings. Presented over nearly 3000-square-metres of exhibition space, the Gropius Bau makes Kusama’s oeuvre accessible to audiences comprehensively for the first time in Germany. The exhibition thus returns to the beginnings of the artist’s widespread popularity in the mid-1960s in German and European contexts, where she was more active than in the USA where she was based at that time. 
Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, adviced by the 0-INSTITUTE.

The Istanbul Sabanci Museum created a web platform with spectacular videos 
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ZERO. Countdown to the Future exhibition, held at SU Sakıp Sabancı Museum from 2 September 2015 to 10 January 2016 with the sponsorship of Akbank, provided an exhilarating representation of ZERO, one of the most extensive movements of thought and art in the 20th century. The exhibition brought together artworks in different materials and techniques by the founders of the movement Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, as well as works by Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, and Lucio Fontana, who inspired and contributed to the movement. Curated by the Founding Director of the ZERO Foundation Mattijs Visser, the exhibition displayed over 100 works, both from this foundation’s collection and the 18 museums and collections. The Sabanci Museum created a web platform and presents the documentation of these works, in which nature and technology interact, through a framework upholding both the artistic methods and concepts adopted by the artists within the ZERO movement.

See the website or download the catalog

a strange story of misunderstanding
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open to the public until February 1st,  2021
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Centre Pompidou-Metz dedicates an ambitious exhibition to Yves Klein, a major figure of the European post-war artistic scene. Well-known for his blue monochromes, he dialogued with numerous European artists belonging to the NUL group in the Netherlands and to the ZERO group in Germany. From May 2020, visitors will (re)discover the artist’s practices through the multiple international exchanges he had. The works of this generation of artists, impulsed with the freedom that followed the end of the Second World War, resolutely reorientate our eyes towards outerspace, proposing an approach to art and to the universe detached from all materiality. Yves Klein exchanged closely with ZERO to explore, the time of an exhibition, colour, light and vibration. Through fire, water, earth and air, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker sought to create a void by using these natural elements.
With his friend Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein explores the spatialist movement, which determined a unit of time and space born from the interaction with the viewer. Shaken up by the conquest of outer-space, these artists appropriated the sky through representations of the cosmos and creations of aerial sculptures. Yves Klein thus developed an « Architecture of the Air » (1958-1961), where the sky, infinite and immaterial, became his workshop. Above and beyond his interest in painting, he combines character and matter, refuses technique and instruments of representation in order to devote himself to an intensive body (Saut dans le vide (jump into emptiness), 1960). The body is « the instrument of a qualitative evaluation » which he uses to paint space: « I am duty bound to go into space, without fraud or trickery [...], the painter of space must go there by himself ». An area inhabited by the sensitivity of each, according to the artist. The exhibition is the opportunity to present contemporary works, but also to reactivate little performed shows.
List of Artists:
Bernard Aubertin, Claude Bellegarde, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Constant, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Hiroshi Hamaya, Oskar Holweck, Eikoh Hosoe, Fumio Kamei, Akira Kanayama, Kikuji Kawada, Yves Klein, Gyula Kosice, Yayoi Kusama, Liliane Ljin, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Sadamasa Motonaga, Saburo Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Roberto Rossellini, Rotraut, Shozo Shimamoto, Fujiko Shiraga, Kazuo Shiraga, Takis, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker, Jef Verheyen, Lothar Wolleh, Gil J. Wolman.

Wim Delvoye, Kimsooja, Nanda Vigo and others on Piero Manzoni

Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni, an enfant terrible of Italian art in the 1950s and early 1960s, is best known for Artist's Shit (Merda d'artista) (1961), 90 sealed cans priced by their weight in gold, one of many works that question the nature of the art object. Other stunts included balloons filled with "artist's breath" and “Living Sculptures,” human subjects signed by Manzoni.

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the documentary