Renowned Japanese ‘Dotty Queen’ Yayoi Kusama has built a museums dedicated to her workin the Shinjuku section of Tokyo, and it is scheduled to open on October 1, according to the Japanese media. Somehow, the artist has managed to keep the project very hush-hush until now.
The five-story museum—a white, large-windowed, curved structure—was built by architecture firm Kume Sekkei and completed in 2014. The institution will be led by director Tensei Tatebata, president of Tama Art University and director of the Saitama Museum of Modern Art.
The second and third floors of the museum will be dedicated to presentations of Kusama’s paintings, sculptures, and other works, while the fourth floor will be dominated by her Infinity Rooms and other wildly popular installations. The top floor will house a reading room and archival material. Timed tickets, which cost ¥1,000 ($9.18), go on sale August 28.
The museum plans to host two rotating exhibitions annually. The inaugural show, “Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art,” on view October 1–February 25, will be devoted to her recent series of paintings, “My Eternal Soul.”
Kusama’s fame rivals that of almost any living artist. Her shows routinely draw lines around the block, and her works are among the most-Instagrammed art in the world.
In its 2014 museum attendance survey, the Art Newspaper called her “the poster girl for the globalization of contemporary art.” When the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, recently mounted a Kusama exhibition, its membership increased by a whopping 6.566 percent. Her first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Singapore this year was also a smashing success. A touring show featuring her Infinity Rooms is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through September 10.
*extracted from artnet news