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“I went to see my doctor, because of my illness. I told him I was making art and painting a lot.” — Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama continues to dominate our Insta-saturated culture, with a blockbuster exhibition opened at Zwirner in New York last week (including a new Infinity Mirror Room that you won’t be able to get a chance to get inside), a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade later this month, a just-announced 3-venue exhibition in Europe launching in 2020, and an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden also opening in 2020. In 2015, acclaimed Argentinian director Martín Rietti visited Kusama in her Tokyo studio and shot this film for NOWNESS, in advance of a traveling retrospective that was opening at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.
This short documentary directed by Rietti for NOWNESS is as intense and quirky as its subject. “She says that if she doesn’t paint she wouldn’t exist,” said Rietti. “Her work has an authenticity that I don’t often see in contemporary art.” The film is titled Self-Obliteration after the feeling that Kusama describes as taking over her body in her youth, which led her to take up art. In the film the artist paints, recites poetry, sings a song, and speaks briefly of her youth and her art.
