More Than 300 Yayoi Kusama Works Take Over a German Museum

To commemorate its 50th birthday, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne has all but handed itself over to Yayoi Kusama. More than 300 of the artist’s striking sculptures, paintings, immersive installations, and more have transformed the revered modern art institution into a symphony of the Japanese artist’s bold visions.

This recently-opened rendition of “Yayoi Kusama” differs from its predecessor at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler earlier this year—and, presumably, from its eventual successor at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam later this year. Cologne’s take features several new artworks, like Kusama’s first installation, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), and her fluorescent-dotted living room I’m Here but Nothing (2000–).

The show itself unfurls like one of Kusama’s recurrent tentacles, reaching beyond the museum’s temporary exhibition spaces towards its largest hall, which now houses a newly commissioned Infinity Room. The show even spreads out onto the roof, where several painted bronze flowers make their exhibition debut, lending a bit of whimsy to the beloved but imposing Cologne Cathedral.

Along the way, “Yayoi Kusama” accounts for its namesake’s entire career—quite literally—from the newly commissioned Infinity Room all the way back to Kusama’s first drawing, produced around 1934, when she was five.

“In my more than 70 years as an artist, I have always been in awe of the wonder of life,” the artist, now 97, said in a statement. “More than anything, this strong sense of the life force in artistic expression is what has supported me and gave me power to overcome feelings of depression, hopelessness, and sadness. I have been guided by my belief in this power.”

Of course, all of Kusama’s major motifs appear, from her pumpkins to her polka dots. But, there’s also drawings and paintings she made throughout the 1950s, in the years between dropping out of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts and moving to Seattle.

There’s scores of material, too, documenting Kusama’s subsequent era as a 30-something artist basking in New York’s limelight at the encouragement of Georgia O’Keeffe. Before she started staging happenings to protest the Vietnam War, Kusama was making soft sculptures somewhat inspired her studio neighbor, Eva Hesse. In 1963, one such sculpture embellished with Kusama’s notorious little phalluses appeared in a SoHo group show alongside the work of Claes Oldenburg.

In 1966, Kusama became the talk of of the Venice Biennale when she started selling the 1,500 mirrored balls comprising Narcissus Garden out from under herself. “Yayoi Kusama” pairs the famed installation with footage from Kusama’s 1985 performance Flower of Basara.

The artist returned to Japan in 1973, after one of her closest friends Joseph Cornell died. Four years later, she moved back to New York. At first, she earned more acclaim from writing than from art. But, in 1987, Fukuoka’s Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art held her first retrospective. Two years later, the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York held her second. By 1993, Kusama was representing Japan at the Venice Biennale with a wildly popular pumpkin that catapulted her practice to unprecedented fame.

Since then, institutions have been locked in a Kusama arms race. Just two years ago, in fact, Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria proudly proclaimed it was hosting one of Kusama’s largest-ever shows, featuring 10 Infinity Rooms—the most ever gathered in one place. But Museum Ludwig’s retrospective has 100 more total artworks—not to mention that new infinity room. It’s the little details in between, though, that remind us Kusama herself remains the greatest spectacle of all.