End: 03 Sep 2017
Location: The National Gallery of Singapore
Address: 1 St. Andrew's Rd, Singapore 178957
The National Gallery of Singapore is set to hold a retrospective exhibition of Yayo Kusama from 10 June to 3 September this year.
'Yayoi Kusama: Life Is The Heart Of A Rainbow' as the museum proclaimed, will be "the first major museum exhibition of her work in Southeast Asia" and will feature the iconic Japanese artist's 120 paintings, sculptures, videos and installations from the 1950s to the present.
Visitors can expect to also see new artwork as well as some of the lesser-seen pieces by Kusama.
"Her personal experiences - from growing up in Japan during World War II, to her success as an Asian female artist in New York and Europe in the 1960s and involvement in social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s - and the resulting art has amazed and inspired millions around the world," explained the National Gallery on its Facebook page.
The "Polka Dot Princess" was crowned the world's most popular artist in 2014, as ranked by museum attendance according to the annual global museum attendance survey by the Art Newspaper.
While Kusama has dropped out of the art world for much of her life — retiring voluntarily to a sanitarium — the Japanese dynamo has been the beating heart of the avant-garde art scene since her arrival in New York in 1957. During the 1960s, Ms. Kusama exhibited alongside and apparently influenced peers such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal, rising to fame in the pop art sphere thanks to her trademark polka dots, performance art and use of psychedelic colors.
While living in New York, Ms. Kusama performed and organized ticketed polka dot orgies, naked anti-tax happenings, anti-war protests and other staged productions, further expanding her star power.
Two ongoing exhibitions of the 87-year-old artist's works are currently taking place at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Tokyo’s National Art Center.