At the start of the project, this room was completely white.
White ceiling, white floor, white walls, white furniture.
People come in, and they are given a sheet of coloured stickers in different sizes
which have been produced, especially for the project
And in accordance with the artist's specifications.
Her choice of colour, her choice of finish and her choice of size.
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.
Kusama is best known for her brilliantly coloured dotted surfaces
her installations with blow-ups and walls covered in
brilliant spots.
And in her biography she talks about experiences really of a
very young child, almost of hallucinogenic experiences
where her vision of landscape and people was clouded by spots.
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 from that period of time, she comes back
to the spot with great regularity
and by the end of the 60s, she's actually painting the landscape
she's painting spots on people's bodies onto animals and the spot
becomes a very regular motif throughout her work.
It's her way of kind of covering the surface.
It's a reflection of her vision, but it's also a way of embracing
the whole world in a kind of overall pattern
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 or walk through, she's now moved on to actually
involving the audience in the creation of this dotted spotted interior.
I think Kusama is now seen alongside people like Murakami
or Damian Hurst or Jeff Koons as a kind of globally branded artist.
Her spots are ubiquitous and they're instantly recognisable.
They're on the face of the London tube map at the moment.
Everywhere we go, we see to the biennials and triennials
across the world we see big Kusama installations
what is also important to recognise, is she really does fit
into art history. She was there in late Surrealism,
she was there at the birth of Pop, she has a relationship to Minimalism,
she's a real key practitioner in the beginnings
of performance and action art. So she's very much somebody who's an insider,
but she was never attached to any one movement for very long.
So she's also somebody who kind of is an outsider
she moves in and out of the kind of principle in
the Avante-garde moments of the mid to late twentieth century.
And now she stands aside them because she's got to that kind
of status, where she's a kind of unique almost celebrity artist of our era.
celebrity artist of our era.