The first publication to provide an overview of Kusama's early performative activities, with unpublished photos and forgotten works from private collections.
Yayoi Kusama's work from the '60s, the time she worked in New York, was regularly shown in exhibitions around the world. Little known until now, however, was that her work originated to a large extent in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, and was exhibited there, more often than in New York.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, a group of young German and Dutch artists undertook to leave the past behind and create a new artistic beginning. Starting with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, they chose the name ZERO in 1958 in Germany, as Piero Manzoni and Jan Schoonhoven did in the Netherlands in the same year. They were followed by Henk Peeters and Armando, who took the Dutch word for zero NUL in 1961. In just five short years, they and their European network created an avant-garde movement that had a strong influence and continues to inspire contemporary artists.
The work of Yayoi Kusama has been shown in different contexts, but it was not clear to date that she was an important figure for European ZERO artists, not in the US, not in the Netherlands or Germany. The ZERO artists responded to post-war abstract expressionism with its dark colour, subjectivity, and emotion. In the words of Piene, ZERO could instead be a 'zone of silence and pure possibilities'. Their interests were fast cars and space travel; one Europe and one universe; science and mechanics; new industrial materials; networks and the media; and art's place outside the museum walls. Both Kusama and ZERO artists explored the monochrome with traditional means such as canvas and paint, but the real challenge was to investigate and influence visitor behaviour with spatial installations. But where the ZERO artists sought the artwork that did not refer to anything, but the artwork itself, Kusama used her artistic body to explore the limits of arts.
This publication provides for the first time an overview of Kusama's early performative activities, not only recorded by Dutch and Belgian photographers; Kusama regularly carried out unique actions for their cameras. Naked and painted with dots, dressed in her own designed 'fashion', in the streets and the sex shop, or just in the Dutch meadows. Since 2005, the 0-INSTITUTE has been collecting archive material with a team of art historians and doing interviews with eyewitnesses, including artists, friends, and organisers. The recent discoveries; unpublished photos from sleeping archives and forgotten works from private collections, led to the development of this publication, with accompanying exhibition due in March 2020. Kusama: Love Forever shines a different light to the artistic activities of Kusama, which was already so colourful and cannot be put under a single heading.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous photo exhibition at the 0-INSTITUTE, Deventer, in 2020.
After studying Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 in Japan) left Japan in the mid-1950s for the United States, where she rapidly established herself as a leading figure of the New York avant-garde. Embodying the spirit of the 1960s, her groundbreaking and unclassifiable work challenged the dominant aesthetic of the day, asserting great formal liberty through the use of multiple media, including painting, sculpture, video, installation, environment, and performance. Yayoi Kusama is considered one of the most important post-war and contemporary artists, with exhibitions all over the world. Her work is not only of historical importance, it also appeals to a young and broad audience, and defies art concepts such as Minimal and Pop Art.
