Every Day I Pray for Love : Yayoi Kusama

Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is pleased to present Every Day I Pray for Love, an exhibition of new and recent works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The exhibition, Kusama's first at Ota Fine Arts Shanghai's Rockbund location, will feature 56 paintings from the series "Every Day I Pray for Love" which Kusama has been actively working on since 2021, and several new drawings. Following Tokyo and Shanghai, the exhibition will also travel to Singapore in September 2024.

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. 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 2024, 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.

About the artist
[Yayoi Kusama] Avant-garde artist and novelist. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. From a young age, Yayoi Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, and began creating net and polka-dot pattern pictures. In 1957, she went to the United States and began making net paintings and soft sculptures, as well as organizing happenings and developing installations that made use of mirrors and lights, establishing herself as an avant-garde artist. Overcoming various obsessions, she discovered an artistic philosophy of self-obliteration via the obsessive repetition and multiplication of single motifs. She continues to actively devote herself to creating artworks, including her largest painting series "My Eternal Soul" from 2009-2021, amounting close to 900 works in 12 years, as well as a new painting series starting in 2021 titled "Every Day I Pray for Love". She received Japan's Order of Culture in 2016. Recently, Kusama has held large-scale retrospective exhibitions at various museums throughout the world, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and M+.