Yayoi Kusama

4 September 2020 to 17 January 2021, Martin Gropiusbau, Berlin

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.