Yayoi Kusama – Self-Obliteration No. 2 (1967)

Louisiana poster with the work, Self-Obliteration No. 2 (1967), by the Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929). The presentation of Kusama's life's work on Louisiana, Kusama - in Infinity, in 2016-2017, 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 no. 2, is from Kusama's formative period in 1960s New York, where new artistic currents such as pop art and minimalism took shape.

Kusama was part of this milieu, but from her position as a non-Western, female artist, she developed a completely distinctive artistic universe that today stands as a significant and deeply original contribution to post-war art.

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 into 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, Kusama herself stands: 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.