Yayoi Kusama – Self-Obliteration by Dots (1968)

Louisiana poster with the work, Self-Obliteration by Dots(1968), by the Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929). The presentation of Kusama's life's work on Louisiana, Kusama - in Infinity, in 2015-2016, was the first retrospective exhibition of the artist's work in Scandinavia, and became one of the most visited exhibitions in the history of Louisiana.

Kusama is a loner in modern art—all her own, deeply original, immensely popular. The poster's motif, Self-obliteration by Dots , is one of the Japanese artist's avant-garde New Yorker works from 1968, where performance and polka dots merge into a higher unity. The artist includes himself as part of the work and anticipates the installation formats that later became so central to Kusama.

In recent decades, Kusama has become world-renowned for her artistic universe of brightly colored, widely branched patterns that cover the surfaces of paintings and sculptures and spread out in extensive installations, where entire rooms, walls, floors and ceilings are covered with soft shapes and dots in strong contrasts in black and yellow or white and red.

In the middle of this boundless visual universe stands Kusama herself: a distinctly present artist persona who is not just behind the works, but preferably in front of them—in photographs often dressed in clothes in the same pattern as the works, an artistic camouflage strategy that makes her visually walk in one with his art.