Every Day I Pray for Love: Yayoi Kusama

Ota Fine Arts is pleased to present "Every Day I Pray for Love," an exhibition of new and recent works by Yayoi Kusama. The exhibition, Kusama's first at Ota Fine Arts in three years, will feature 48 paintings from the series “Every Day I Pray for Love” which Kusama has been actively working on since 2021, and two new drawings. The exhibition will travel to Shanghai (May2024) and Singapore (September 2024).

Yayoi Kusama's 70-year career has been marked by numerous masterpieces. In particular, Kusama's repetitive use of nets and polka dots to fill the canvases and spaces has cemented her title as the 'Queen of Polka Dots'. At the turn of the century, however, she transcended this reputation and gave birth to two series of paintings, "Love Forever" (2004-2007) and "My Eternal Soul" (2009-2021). In the former, she painted figurative subjects such as eyes, profiles, and plants on white canvas with a black marker pen, enveloping the canvas with a brightness that Lynn Zelevansky described as "whimsical and cute, making them difficult to digest”.1 In the latter where Kusama switched from marker pen to paint brush. While all kinds of colours jumbles over the canvases, conflicting concepts and forms of "life and death," "micro and macro," "war and peace," and "figurative and abstract," coalesce into a cohesive whole. With a relentless creative drive and concentration that pervaded these two series of paintings counting close to 900 pieces, Kusama pushed the boundaries of her own artistic expression once again.

Kusama presents the next chapter in her latest series, Every Day I Pray for Love (2021-present), the subject of this exhibition. She updates her own expressive language with the appearance of ‘sentences’. Among her signature motifs such as nets, dots and profiles, Kusama often mixes marker pen and acrylic paints to create one or more circles on the canvas, within which she writes her own poems and messages in Japanese or English. The subtle changes in the weight and speed of her brush strokes vividly conveys the rhythms of her breath.

- Life is beautiful. In responding to the reverberation of self-destruction, I wonder if I could live a day overcoming death, a whole day, today or a whole day tomorrow. Forever invisible, in the brilliance of life and death I want to live until the end without taking my own life. from YAYOI KUSAMA (Every Day I Pray for Love)

- Brimming with the Brilliance of Life What Is Beauty? It's the Archetype of Love. Who cares if death is lying in wait. Keep Running along the Noble Path YAYOI KUSAMA(Every Day I Pray for Love)

- A Message of Love from Yayoi Kusama – Clinging to the shadows of the guidepost to art, I have long walked on my own A desire for the brilliance of life, a desire for brilliance (Every Day I Pray for Love)

These texts are filled with Kusama’s boundless longing for life and a desire to share her art with the world, all the while conscious of her own mortality. While some of the sentences are underlined and surrounded by polka dots, as if to confirm and emphasize each word, others are liberated from their semantics and symbolically incorporated as a form of letters and lines. The back of the work must also be mentioned. Signatures or undulating lines are repeated in every block that is divided by the stretcher grid. When asked about the source of her ideas, Kusama has always replied, "Please ask my hand." All the kinds of lines that she has drawn throughout her life, and remembered by her right hand, appear one after another on the front and back of these works.

Familiar expressions, such as polka dots and nets, also show rich variations. Kusama, who has filled tens of thousands of canvases with infinity nets through the repetitive gestures that have become part of her, has now, at 2023, given new characters such as framing them with black dots, or layering over white dots on top of the nets. She also shows complex brushwork when she weaves the finely spun nets back and forth between the orderly and the disorderly, and then suddenly drowns it out with strong, rough traces.

Since the pandemic in 2020, Kusama has been working in her own room, and the size of her work has become proportionate with her living space. This series continues to emerge from her desire to create art outside the confines of the self. They are the very traces of Kusama's life.

1 Zelevansky, Lynn. “Flying Deeper and Farther: Kusama in 2005.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 13 (2006): 54–62.