NGV will host major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama’s art

More than 180 works spanning eight decades of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s colourful career will take over the Melbourne institution.

Curators Wayne Crothers and Miranda Wallace with Yayoi Kusama’s Revelation from Heaven 1989. Picture: Eugene Hyland

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most instagrammed artists of our time, unsurprising given her joyful, colourful polka dot mirror rooms and bright, boldly patterned giant pumpkin sculptures. It sounds like a curator’s dream, yet according to Wayne Crothers there’s more than meets the (public) eye.

“It’s more than just a selfie moment, it’s part of an incredible journey,” Crothers said. “There’s visual recognition and popularity there, yet people don’t realise how far back it goes in terms of Kusama’s development, because they haven’t been introduced to it. Our role is to give people a greater understanding of the art and her work.”

Spanning eight decades, the contemporary Japanese artist’s prolific and diverse range will be on display in full in Yayoi Kusama at the National Gallery of Victoria from December, the most comprehensive retrospective of her work ever seen in Australia.

Curated by Crothers, the NGV’s senior curator of Asian art, in conjunction with Kusama, who approved the loan of invitations, letters, handbills and photographs from her personal archive, the exhibition will feature more than 180 works including the global premiere of her latest immersive mirror room, created for the NGV exhibition.

Kusama was born in 1929 in rural Matsumoto, Nagano to parents who ran a plant nursery and were thoroughly against their daughter becoming an artist. Nevertheless she went on to study art and exhibit in Japan, before moving to New York in 1958, soon exhibiting alongside contemporaries including Andy Warhol and Swedish-American sculptor Claes Oldenburg. In 1973 she returned to Japan where her practice continued to evolve, ultimately spanning drawing, paintings, sculpture, collage, fashion, video and installation.

Yayoi Kusama.

Such is her global influence and commercial appeal today she has been invited to collaborate with fashion label Louis Vuitton and the MoMA Design Store in New York; while she was recently named the highest-grossing contemporary artist for 2023 according to international insurance group Hiscox.

Astonishingly at 95 Kusama is still working and the exhibition will extend from her most recent mirrored “infinity room” right back to her first artworks, aged nine, two drawings featuring the dots that would become her trademark. They reflect the hallucinations and mental ill-health she would go on to experience regularly.

“Art as therapy is a relatively recent [concept] but something Kusama was doing herself right back to her childhood,” Crothers said. “She’s expressing that artists’ work can heal in beautiful ways.”

Each chapter of her artistic evolution is captured in Yayoi Kusama, including her early experiment with bright colours and expressive brushstrokes on an old seed sack, a raft of letters exchanged with American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, her large-scale net paintings, fashion, inventive collages and a towering 5m bronze pumpkin sculpture.

“People relate to the playful nature and immersive experience, the way she transports us to another place, putting us in a world we wouldn’t normally experience,” Crothers said. “We hope the exhibition will take people on a journey through all the things that have led up to the Kusama who is the global phenomenon she is today.”

Yayoi Kusama will be on display from December 15 to 21 April 2025 at Melbourne’s NGV International.

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama's Dots obsession 1996/2015 at Kusama's solo exhibition YAYOI KUSAMA: IN INFINITY, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark.