Polka Dot Love Room, 1967

Between infinity and nothingness, there is only desire. Specifically that of Yayoi Kusama, which is immense, even cosmic, and currently being shown in museums throughout the world with unprecedented visitor turnouts. Her grammar expresses an eternal return to the gesture of illness – accumulative, repetitive, fragmentary – which over the course of more than seven decades of artistic production became, time and again, a ritual. Kusama (Matsumoto, 1929) seeks to cure herself of her hallucinations and suicidal tendencies through exercises in radical art-therapy, and although she has voluntarily resided in a mental health facility since 1973, she walks daily to her nearby studio to work for nine hours, waging an epic battle between her hand and her paintbrush, but also a tautological one, between the unnecessary and the prodigious…[+]