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. 
At the Museum Ludwig in Cologne the show will begin in April 2021, at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen it will be on view from October 2021 on.
Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Yilmaz Dziewior and Beatrix Ruf. In close collaboration with the artist and the 0-INSTITUTE.

In 2020, Centre Pompidou Metz will stage “the Sky as Studio. Yves Klein and his contemporaries" - an exhibition exploring the theme of space and the dematerialization of art in the works of Yves Klein and his fellow artists. It focuses on the collaboration between Yves Klein and significant figures from the groups Zero, Nul, the Italian Spatialist movement as well as Gutai artists, to cast light on a shared vision of space as a new artistical dimension and as a territory to conquer. Emma Lavigne curates the exhibition. The 0-INSTITUTE will advice Pompidou on the selection of artworks and lend documents from the archive. The exhibition opens 2 May and runs until 2 November. 

Together with the 0-institute, the Armando foundation will set up an international scientific advisory-board to stimulate research into Armando and the network of both artists and poets. Besides both foundations decided to publish the first overview of all the works created by Armando in the so-called "zero" period. The catalog raisonné is planned for 2022, in a printed and digital form. 

The 0-Institute would like to be in contact with art-historians, interested in Armando his early artworks and poetry.

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 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. Scheduled for March 2020.

Not far from Milan, in the historic village of Soncino, Palazzo Meroni was owned by the parents of Piero Manzoni. It was in this Palazzo, that Manzoni had his first studio, and where he worked in the summer. Just outside the village is where his grave is now.  But not only Manzoni lived and worked here, also Piero Dorazio and Enea Ferrari lived and taught here. The Herning Art Museum (HEART), together with the 0-INSTITUTE and a German private investor, bought the Palazzo to organize in the near future exhibitions, to open studios for visiting artists, and to bring the "Biennale Socle du Monde" from Herning to Soncino. Piero Manzoni, who had one of his first sales exhibitions in the Netherlands; and who was good friends with Henk Peeters, Herman de Vries, and Jan Schoonhoven is also for the Netherlands and the international ZERO network an important historical figure. And as several Dutch museums have important Manzoni works in their collection, and as the 0-INSTITUTE holds correspondence, films, and publications from and about Manzoni, the 0-INSTITUTE will collaborate with the Palazzo Meroni on research and exhibitions.

In Deventer, not far from the German border, one hour traveling from Amsterdam, the European Institute for Contemporary Art and Science (EICAS) will open its doors in the Hegius-Huis der Kunsten. The 0-INSTITUTE will be imbedded in the Hous of Arts and advice EICAS on their activities. Also other artist foundations will find a roof at the Hegius-house and develop their own activities. The building will be renovated by architect office Hans van Heeswijk, with an archive, library, artist studios, offices and exhibition spaces, opening end 2020. The Hegius-house is a privately initiated and funded project. 

Zero was dominated by men. This is the prejudice, and a look at the museum and market presence of artists like Lucio Fontana or Günther Uecker seems to confirm it. It is forgotten that even artists such as Nanda Vigo, Rotraut, Hal Busse or Yayoi Kusama played a not to be underestimated role in the Zero network formed in the late 1950s. Tim Ackermann of Weltkunst has followed her lead.

The archive includes not only a complete overview of his artworks, it includes also several essays and interviews with Peeters about his close friends Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese Gutai group, and Piero Manzoni. Click here to enter >>>