Kusama Floor Show (60s exhibition poster)

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Yayoi Kusama
Kusama Floor Show (60s exhibition poster)
1965

About the Item

Yayoi Kusama, Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, 1965 Original 1965 exhibition poster designed by Kusama to promote the artist's Floor Show: a seminal exhibition where Kusama started to utilize mirrors. 'Floor Show' featured an Infinity Mirror Room Phalli’s Field and was perhaps the most important breakthrough for Kusama during the 1960s. The reflective surfaces allowed her vision to transcend the physical limitations of her own productivity. Furthermore, the mirrors created a participatory experience by casting the visitor as the subject of the work, a feature that the artist demonstrated through a provocative series of self-portraits in which she used her body to activate the space. This work first appeared in the exhibition Floor Show at Castellane Gallery - making this extremely rare Kusama New York collectible, a must have. *This example is also addressed on the verso to none other than, 'Mr & Mrs Claes Oldenburg,' who knew Kusama in the early sixties and lived in the same building as she for several years in lower Manhattan. RARE and not to be passed upon. Offset lithograph, printed 1965 16.75 x 21.5 inches (43.5 x 56.5 cm.) Fold-lines as originally issued; small scattered pin-holes; light reside in a couple of areas; otherwise well-preserved and in very good condition for its age. Scarce from an edition of unknown Originally acquired from the collection of photographer Harry Shunk (photographed Kusama during her NY years) Further Background From the time she arrived in New York in June of 1958 until performance began to dominate her oeuvre a decade later, Yayoi Kusama produced a powerful body of work that was as wide-ranging in its experimentation with an array of mediums as a predecessor of subsequent artistic developments in the United States. In 1967 Kusama began to stage Body Festivals and Anatomic Explosions in public parks and at historic landmarks in New York City (and later in the Netherlands). Fueled by feminism and sexual liberation, they would start as peaceful performances before quickly descending into orgiastic tangles of limbs and body paint. It was a vision of sexuality and free-love offering a punchy rebuttal to the beloved branding of pop art. Polka dots became Kusama’s weapon against America’s growing culture of self-serving individuality – a way of making everything the same, and becoming one with the universe. Or, in other words, ‘self-obliterating’. Because all of her works are fundamentally performative, the process involved in making the art always takes precedence over the final product. Named 'the world's most popular artist' in 2015, it's not hard to see why Yayoi Kusama continues to dazzle contemporary art audiences globally. Related Categories Kusama polka dots. 1960s Kusama. Kusama prints. Psychedelic. Pop. Surrealist. Pop Art.

Creator:
Yayoi Kusama (1929, Japanese)
Creation Year:
1965
Dimensions:
Height: 21.5 in (54.61 cm)Width: 16.75 in (42.55 cm)
Medium:
Offset
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
1960-1969
Condition:
Fold-lines as originally issued; minor wear.
Gallery Location:
NEW YORK, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU35433098783

Shop All Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

Widely inspirational and innovative artist Yayoi Kusama has a body of work that is exceptionally varied, ranging from graphic prints and paintings to polka-dot pumpkin sculptures, hypnotic collages, large-scale installations and fashion design.

Even if you don’t know her name, you’ve likely experienced Kusama’s art — or have seen it on Instagram. Her soft sculptures and dazzling “Infinity Mirrors” are the stuff of selfie-takers’ dreams, but Kusama’s impressive decades-long career certainly holds far more cachet than it does fodder for today’s aspiring social-media influencers.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama has worked with her signature polka dots since the age of 10, when she began to experience vivid hallucinations and claimed that patterns and dots were moving around her, swallowing up everything in view. She started to incorporate them into her paintings as a child. Kusama saw circular forms and nets on every surface and became especially fascinated with the pebbles that lined the bottom of the creek near her childhood home. Her family was sternly opposed to her art and her mother physically abused Kusama and discouraged her at a very early age. She has suffered psychological turmoil her whole life and is vocal about her mental illness. Today, Kusama is a voluntary resident at a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, and she calls her work “art medicine.”

At the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama trained in Nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting that originated during the Meiji period. On advice she solicited from painter Georgia O'Keeffe, a pioneer of modernism in America whom she greatly admired, she subsequently moved to New York City in 1958. There, Kusama flourished, creating prescient sculptures and large-scale monochrome paintings that bridged current styles with minimalism, which hadn’t yet achieved any kind of prominence as an art movement. She pushed boundaries with her “Accumulations” series, which saw her transforming found furniture pieces into sexualized objects, as well as with an avant-garde staging of theatrical orgies on the street — both stemming from her anxieties about sex as well as an endeavor to make a feminist statement about patriarchal authority and sexism.

Kusama was captivated by Surrealists as well as the Abstract Expressionists and greatly influenced the Pop artists who followed, befriending such icons as Donald Judd — who called her work “the best paintings being done” — and Andy Warhol, with whom she exhibited and later accused of stealing her ideas. Kusama moved with ease through artistic circles and made a point to draw attention to her “otherness” as a Japanese woman by wearing kimonos to her openings.

In 2021, Kusama brought her floral and vegetal sculptures to the New York Botanical Garden and her works can be found in the collections of many of the world’s top museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. She famously collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2012, and she created a 34-foot-tall balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan in 2019, becoming the first female artist to design a work for the event. In addition to her visual artwork, Kusama is a writer, publishing poetry, novels and an autobiography.

Find a collection of Yayoi Kusama art on 1stDibs.