Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers

The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor

＂My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.＂ --Yayoi Kusama

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements--such as dots--to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural maze of pumpkin walls, a lush garden of towering flowers, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, the result is a book that offers the sense of experiencing the work in person for readers who have not had the chance.

New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s (b. 1929) work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Lynn Zelevansky is an American art historian and curator.

Robert Slifkin is a professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art and photography. He is the author of The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945-1975 and Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, which was awarded the Phillips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as American Art, Artforum, The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Burlington Magazine, October, Oxford Art Journal, and Racquet.