KUSAMA OBLITERATION ROOM FREE

As well as having a chance to cover every available surface of the installation with bright circular stickers, families will also be able to create their own work of art to add to an ever-growing garden in the Turbine Hall.

KUSAMA OBLITERATION ROOM FREE

Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room opens on 23rd July as part of UNIQLO Tate Play, Tate Modern’s free programme of playful art-inspired activities for families. She moves in and out of the kind of principal avant garde moments of the mid to late twentieth century.Īnd now she stands beside them, because she has got that status where she is a kind of unique, almost celebrity artist of our era.Over the school summer holidays, Tate Modern invites visitors of all ages to help transform a blank white apartment into a sea of colourful dots. So she’s very much somebody who is an insider, but she was never attached to any one movement for very long, so she’s always.also somebody who kind of is an outsider. She has a relationship to Minimalism, she’s a real key practitioner in the beginnings of performance and action art. But what is also important to recognise is she really does fit into art history, and she was there in late Surrealism, she was there at the birth of Pop. Everywhere we go we see.to the biennials and triennials across the world, you see big Kusama installations. They are on the face of the London tube map at the moment. Her spots are ubiquitous, and they are instantly recognisable. I think Kusama is now seen alongside people like Murakami or Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons as a kind of globally branded artist. And the interesting thing about this work in particular is that where she’s moved from creating an environment of spots that we passively appreciate or enjoy a walk through, she has now moved on to actually involving the audience in the creation of this dotted, spotted interior.

It’s a reflection of her vision, but it’s also a way of embracing the whole world in a kind of overall pattern. It’s her way of kind of covering the surface. And from that period of time, she comes back to the spot with great regularity, and by the end of the sixties, she is actually painting a landscape, she’s painting spots on people’s bodies, onto animals, and the spot becomes a very regular motif throughout her work. And in her very, very first mature works of art, just after finishing art school in Kyoto, the spot emerges as a pattern in her work.

And in her biography, she talks about experiences really of a very young child, almost sort of hallucinogenic experiences, where her vision of landscape and people was clouded by spots. Kusama is best known for her brilliantly coloured dotted surfaces, her installations with blow-ups and her walls covered in brilliant spots. And then everybody is invited to place the stickers anywhere they like in the room, according to any pattern, any idea they have, anything they like they can do with the stickers. People come in, they are given a sheet of coloured stickers in different sizes, which have been produced specially for the project and in accordance with the artist’s specifications her choice of colour, her choice of finish, and her choice of size. At the start of the project, this room was completely white – white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white furniture.

Kusama obliteration room