YAYOI KUSAMA b. 1929

Painter, sculptor, filmmaker and performer Yayoi Kusama is a celebrated avant-garde provocateur best known for her works featuring repetitive patterns and psychedelic imagery that evoke psychology, feminism and obsession as well as sex, creation, destruction and self-reflection.
In 1957, she left Japan to live in New York, where she met Donald Judd and Franck Stella. Attached to the New York avant-garde, the artist is seen as a pioneer of environmental art. Six years later, she returned to Tokyo, and at the end of the 1960s collaborated with the Zero group of artists Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein. She also exhibited in many museums in the Netherlands and Italy. Representing Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, the artist was also exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 1999, the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2000, the Biennale d'art de Lyon in 2003 and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2004.
The French Minister of Culture awarded her the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Japanese Art Association awarded her the Praemium Imperiale. In the following years, she created public sculptures on commission and made several films and documentaries, the most recent in 2008. That same year, Kusama became the best-selling women artist in her lifetime, breaking auction records. She lives and works in Tokyo.