Bilbao (EFE) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
The Bilbao exhibition center dedicates to the Japanese creator, unknown to the general public in Spain despite being considered one of the most influential and iconic artists of contemporary art and who rubbed shoulders in New York with North American pop-art figures such as Andy Warhol or Oldenburg Class, the largest retrospective of his work in the last decade, which brings together almost 200 works created between 1945 and 2022.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the M+ Museum in Hong Kong and goes beyond the norms of previous retrospectives dedicated to the 94-year-old artist, who maintains her creative activity despite her advanced age (in 2021 and 2022 she created 15 new works for this exhibition), which were structured chronologically, while on this occasion it is done by the themes that interested the artist throughout her almost 8 decades of artistic career.
UNSTABLE MENTAL HEALTH
This career, which began in 1945, has been mediated, as can be seen when observing the evolution of her work, both due to her personal situation (a petite young woman wanting to be an artist in the strongly conservative and patriarchal Japan that emerged from the defeat in World War II World War) and his unstable mental health.
Yoyoi Kusama suffered hallucinations at the end of the 1960s, the result of which were her series of figures with moles and later a deep depression accompanied by suicidal thoughts that led her to voluntarily enter a psychiatric center in Japan in the mid-1970s. upon his return from the United States.
The Japanese artist continues to live in this center today, from which she only left until the Covid-19 pandemic to go to her workshop to carry out her works, recalled the curators of the exhibition, Doryun Chong, from M+ in Hong Kong. , and Lucía Agirre, from the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Fruit of this period were his works and installations on Death, which are, in the opinion of the curators of the exhibition, “a revelation of what was going through his psyche.”
“Talking about it allows you to renew your desire to live and keeps the idea of suicide at bay. Mental health is not for Kusama something disabling to exercise her art, but it was a facilitating force of her creativity throughout her career, ”Doryun Chong has maintained.
ANTI-RACIST AND ANTI-WAR
During her stay in New York, the artist showed in her works her concern for the environment, for the gender and racial discrimination she perceived in American society, and she positioned herself against the Vietnam War with her participation in numerous protest actions. complaint in the streets of the North American city.
The last part of the exhibition, entitled “The force of life”, is made up of numerous cheerful and colorful works, which contrast with the dark references to death that precede it, and which also reflect his personal triumph over depression and the suicidal thoughts.
Despite her advanced age, Yoyoi Kusama maintains her creative activity and, despite not having been able to travel to Bilbao to be present at the opening of her exhibition this Monday, she has sent a brief text to the Museum in which she states that “in this chaotic world I would use all the power of art to fully express the desire for peace and the magnificence of humanity.”
“Hearts burning with fiery red love, eternal and inexhaustible. Let us pray together for love ”, she concludes.
The exhibition, which is made up of paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, archival material from her performances, and collages made with paper cutouts, will remain open until October 8. EFE