Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective Opens 23 April 2021 At The Gropius Bau

23 April to 1 August 2021

Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective
A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe

Gropius Bau to open major Yayoi Kusama retrospective in April with her most complex immersive exhibition to date

“Yayoi Kusama’s work is characterised by revolutionary interventions driven by the desire for a union of body and artwork, and an urge to redefine the role of women in art.”
– Stephanie Rosenthal, Director, Gropius Bau

The Gropius Bau announces that Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, a major overview of world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b.1929), will open from 23 April 2021 with her most complex immersive project to date. The installation A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe (2021) was realised by Kusama uniquely for the vast historic atrium of the Gropius Bau, which will erupt in a sea of large-scale inflatable tentacles for the exhibition’s duration.

Kusama’s first museum retrospective in Germany unfolds across almost 3000 m² and features nearly 300 works from the last 80 years.

Subtitled A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe, the exhibition spans gouaches on paper, accumulative sculptures, happenings and fashion work, culminating in her recent paintings and a brand new Infinity Mirror Room. The immersive installation will be shown alongside a reconstruction of the artist’s first Infinity Mirror Room, presented in New York in 1965.

The exhibition will feature eight additional exhibition reconstructions from 1952 to 1983, alongside archival materials. Emphasising Kusama’s lesser-known time in Europe, the exhibition also shows how Kusama’s performative works prefigured the self-staging of today’s social media and how she redefined the role of women in art.

Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau, in close collaboration with the artist and her studio in Tokyo, Japan. The exhibition draws extensively on Kusama’s personal archive which Rosenthal and the exhibition team visited in person.

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