Books by Yayoi Kusama

In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.With a new focus on Yayoi Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating, poetic titles of her paintings, such as in I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry also collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else.  Centered around EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, the book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirror Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

This book accompanies Yayoi Kusama's first major European retrospective exhibition, offering a comprehensive overview of the Japanese artist's influential oeuvre, which spans more than eighty years.

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This extraordinary text tells the story of her life and remarkable career in her own words.

This book comes in three different color patterns (all with the same cover design).The most comprehensive book devoted to the incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in 1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that forged a new visual vocabulary—the Net paintings, which were composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973 she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today. Since then, she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this book—created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo studio—the breadth and import of this watershed artist’s career are considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist’s extensive archive that have never been seen before. The publication is timed to coincide with the artist’s major touring retrospective, which makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton.Contributors include: Leslie Camhi, RoseLeeGoldberg, Laura Hoptman, Chris Kraus, Arthur Lubow, Kevin McGarry, Louise Neri, Akira Tatehata, and Olivier Zahm.