Yayoi Kusama Retrospective at Gropius Bau Postponed to March 2021

After debuting at Gropius Bau, the exhibition was scheduled to travel to Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.

Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists. In March 2021, the Gropius Bau will devote the first comprehensive retrospective in Germany to Kusama’s work. Spanning almost 3000 m², the exhibition will offer an overview of her central creative periods across the past 80 years, including a number of new works as well as a newly realised Infinity Mirror Room.

The retrospective will focus primarily on tracing the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Germany and Europe. Since the 1960s, the artist has been actively engaged in realising exhibition projects outside the former centre of her life in New York and showing her work in a European context. This has also brought to the fore Kusama’s role as a pioneer of personal branding, who early on in her practice intentionally staged and marketed her own artistic persona and multidisciplinary work.

Within the exhibition framework, reconstructions will allow viewers to experience the pioneering nature of her presentational forms and artistic subjects, making accessible Kusama’s early exhibition projects in Germany and Europe in the 1960s and central solo exhibitions in the USA and Asia from the 1950s to 1980s.

Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal (director, Gropius Bau), the exhibition was planned in close collaboration with Yayoi Kusama and her studio.

A different Kusama show at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) was also rescheduled. KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature was originally planned for May 9–November 1, 2020, and will now take place in spring through fall 2021.