Kusama. Obsessions, loves and art

Expanses of speckled gourds, clusters of phalluses, polka dots, branching, tentacles soaring from the ground and knotted tentacles of glowing millecolors, plants and flowers reaching up to the ceiling. Inside everything, she, Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1929), the chameleon artist who transformed paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, obsessive anxiety and arrhythmias into a loop of shapes and colors, in a habitat at once fairy-tale, suspended and sinister where repetition is deconstruction of fear. In the story of the woman who now deliberately lives in a mental institution, always with colors in her hand as a magic shield, coexist childhood among the voices of violet fields, the canvases torn from her mother, the betrayals of the father she was forced to spy on. And then the letter to Giorgia O’Keefee, the escape to New York, in her suitcase sixty kimonos and two thousand drawings and paintings to sell.
In America Kusama’s hunger, depersonalization and phobia are such that it is not enough to paint a canvas, one must paint everything around it and stay there. And while she stays Yayoi rides the hippie revolution, meets Cornell, Warhol, Read, and Smith, invades galleries, finds the courage to return to Japan, attempts suicide, and after twenty years in which emptiness breaks fame, a retrospective in New York puts her back where she belongs.