CURRENT EXHIBITION

In parallel with World Expo Osaka Kansai 2025, the Espace Louis Vuitton Osaka is proud to present YAYOI KUSAMA: INFINITY – Selected Works from the Collection, a brand new exhibition bringing together works by the iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, from her emergence on the global art scene through to her current work. The chronological arc of this exhibition provides insight not only into the breadth and variety of her work, but also the unifying threads that have guided her practice from the New York of the early 1960s to the present day. This presentation lives within the framework of the “Hors-les-murs” programme of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, thus following the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience.

Yayoi Kusama is a prolific artist whose work is remarkable for its shape-shifting identity and compulsive proliferation. At every stage of her career she has displayed an extraordinary level of creative energy as a painter, sculptor, performance artist, novelist and fashion designer. The pieces presented in this exhibition facilitate exploration of the relationship between her creative journey and certain major currents in the history of Japanese and American art, against and with which Kusama has built her practice. Although her artistic career has interacted with, and inspired, both pop art and minimalism, her essential strength lies in the impressive independence that her highly personal pieces reflect and retain, right up to the most recent pieces shown in this exhibition.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in Japan’s Nagano prefecture, and based in Tokyo since 1973, Yayoi Kusama grew up surrounded by plants in a family who owned a plant nursery and seed farm. She was around 10 years old and already drawing and painting when she experienced her first hallucinations. These included envisioning the interior of her family home covered in flower motifs that eventually engulfed her. These childhood memories form the basis of her mythology and its accompanying psychic turmoil, both of which have driven her art ever since. In a process she describes as “self-therapy", she compulsively repeats motifs that have become powerful signatures and are clear to see in the pieces curated in this exhibition. The Infinity Nets and Dots of the 1960s have developed in more recent pieces to become floating forms suggesting stars, cells and total abstraction. Throughout her career, she has used this technique to give form to her fears and obsessions.

These motifs give shape to Kusama's essential philosophy. At the heart of the exhibition, the first of her many Infinity Mirror Rooms, Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (or Floor Show) (1965/2013), welcomes visitors to become disorientated as they immerse themselves in a world of endlessly repeated polka dots. In this iconic environment, as in the poetry that accompanies Every Day I Pray for Love (2023) and in her repetitive painting practice, the artist reveals both her hallucinatory visions and her philosophy on the place we occupy as individuals within the universe. Through the broad diversity of techniques she uses in her Dots and Infinity Nets, Kusama beckons the viewer to think about infinity and allow themselves to be absorbed by the visual experience in a process she calls “self-obliteration”. She effectively invites us to step back and become one with the environment that envelops us all.

About the Fondation Louis Vuitton

The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20^th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organizes seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21^st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation's seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than ten million visitors from France and around the world.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific "Hors-les-murs" programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.