Perlensucher
Yayoi Kusama - Sunset, 2011 / Conversations in Heaven, 2012 / Seeking the Soul, 2012
2025
As an influential representative of international post-war art, Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan) is one of the most important contemporary artists. She became famous for her iconic polka dots, pumpkin sculptures, and mirrored Infinity Rooms, which combine painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and literature. Her work is strongly influenced by personal experiences such as hallucinations and psychological fears and revolves around themes such as infinity, self-dissolution, sexuality, and power structures.
After studying art in Kyoto, Kusama emigrated to the US in 1958 and lived in New York until the early 1970s, where she gained international attention with provocative happenings, installations, and her “Infinity Nets”. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan, where she published novels and poems in addition to her visual art. Since the 1990s, her work has received worldwide recognition, including through her participation in the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 2017, a museum was dedicated to her in Tokyo, where Kusama continues to live and work today.
Sunset, 2011
Conversations in Heaven, 2012
Seeking the Soul, 2012
With the purchase of three works by Yayoi Kusama, the Museum Ludwig collection is being expanded to include key works from her late career. Seeking the Soul and Conversations in Heaven from 2012, as well as Sunset from 2011, address Kusama’s lifelong exploration of infinity, spirituality, and the dissolution of the self, visualized through her characteristic nets, serial patterns, and luminous color fields. The works illustrate Kusama’s consistent preoccupation with repetition as an artistic and existential principle and are also exemplary of the connection between painting, meditation, and subjective experience of the world.