Tag Archives: female artists

Kusama at the Whitney (a belated post from Hungary)

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Note: I meant to send this before I left for Hungary, and then have a fresh start about Hungarian art…but here this draft is, sitting and waiting to be published. So…

Self-Portrait, 1972. Collage with pastel, ballpoint pen, and ink on paper.

Yayoi Kusama courted and received a lot of attention in New York in the 1960s for her truly groundbreaking and unique work. It’s how the Whitney Museum of American Art can justify having the Japanese artist’s retrospective on view, despite her having lived most of her life in Japan, as she still does today. Kusama has her trademark polka dot works up, supported by some works from the beginning of her career, documentation about her activities in the 60s in New York, and a final roomful of her most recent paintings, all atop each other like the inside of a Kusamaesque Rubik’s cube.

The exhibition allows you to see how themes develop in her career–her initial white dot paintings become dots she paints on people to “obliterate” them, which becomes the undulating patterns of her paintings in the 2000s. She also returns to soft, abstract sculptural forms reminiscent of the body and of Louise Bourgeois, at multiple points.

Man Catching the Insect, 1972. Collage with oil on paper.

Her collage works, two examples of which are shown here, don’t fit as neatly into these patterns. They aren’t as clean and graphic design-y as her current works, but I found them as strong as anything else in the show. The more literally evoke Surrealism and the exploration of consciousness, but they do it in a very Kusama (note the polka dots) and very accomplished way. They are one of the rare times her obsessive attention to detail combines with recognizable imagery. Kusama is notoriously and publicly of a “fragile mental state,” to quote the artist herself, and these works show again how that mental instability plays into and feeds her artistic production.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series

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The Art Institute’s room of Ana Mendieta works in the Contemporary section were striking (plus, how fantastic that they organize the rooms by artist). Mostly showing the Silueta Series, the performances and the images taken of them show the contours of the artist’s body against the earth in different settings. Often, this image is created with organic material although the artist frequently uses her own body in her work, like in this Untitled (Grass on Woman) from 1972:


Called earth-body art in a hybrid of two 1960s art movements, Mendieta used her body or a female outline in her performances. The show her interjecting the female form into nature, often evoking a sense of ancestral and prototypical female goddess worship.

More information about the artist’s background and untimely death.

Claire Twomey: White Baroque

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Claire Twomey combines a Baroque excess of domestic–therefore feminine–paraphernalia with a Minimalist palette that manages not to overwhelm in her immersive ceramic installations. The white palette is really interesting with the shadows that come into play. They are installations rather than sculptures because they not only interact with their environment but because they often involve the viewer as well.
A bit like Rachel Whiteread’s  signature plaster casts of the insides of ordinary domestic objects, like wardrobes, beds, floors and baths in 1988 that have been described as “minimalism with a heart”. This artist, also British, has done a number of cool things, including but not limited to:
  1. In London in 2006, Twomey created an intervention that wanted to  create an interaction between the Victoria & Albert Museum and the audience. The work, Trophy, filled the cast courts with 4000 Jasper Blue birds. The birds sitting amongst the classical sculptures created a three-dimensional landscape to walk within. 
  2. For Consciousness/conscience 3000 units of porcelain were produced to create a temporary floor at the Ceramic Biennial in Korea. The floor was crushed by the participation of the audience during the exhibition period. Crunch crunch. That kind of porcelain destruction seems absolutely delicious to me.