Pure Taste Indicator - Artist Page

courtesy of collectionofthefame.net

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist working in a variety of media. Using painting, sculpture, film, and installation, Kusama produces a body of work unified in its use of repetitive, densely patterned polka dots. Considered a predecessor of Pop Art, she was born on March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto City, Japan and moved to New York in 1958. She quickly established herself as an important member of the avant-garde alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Eva Hesse. Kusama has explained her use of repetition and polka dots in her work as a means to explore infinity and obsessively negate the self, such as in her immersive installations Infinity Mirror Room (1965) and Fireflies on the Water (2002). Though the artist left New York and returned to Japan in the 1970s to live in a mental hospital and briefly fell into obscurity, Kusama?s work received newly heightened recognition and popularity after she represented Japan in the 1993 Venice Biennale. She has been the subject of regular museum and gallery exhibitions ever since, and in 2008, her work broke records to make her the highest-priced living female artist. Kusama currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.http://www.artnet.com/artists/yayoi-kusama/