Every Day I Pray for Love
Ota Fine Arts Singapore is pleased to present "Every Day I Pray for Love," an exhibition of new and recent works by Yayoi Kusama. The travelling exhibition, Kusama's first at Ota Fine Arts in three years, began from Tokyo (March 2024) to Shanghai (May 2024) and makes its final stop in Singapore (September 2024). It will feature over 50 paintings from the series “Every Day I Pray for Love” and several drawings, which Kusama has been actively working on since 2021, as well as her recent wall relief sculptures, SOULS OF WOMEN THAT CONTINUE FOREVER (2019), which are a new addition to the Singapore presentation.
Yayoi Kusama's 70-year career has been marked by numerous masterpieces. In particular, Kusama's repetitive use of nets and polka dots to fill the canvases and spaces has cemented her title as the 'Queen of Polka Dots'. At the turn of the century, however, she transcended this reputation and developed two series of paintings, Love Forever (2004-2007) and My Eternal Soul (2009-2021), in which she painted figurative subjects such as eyes, profiles, and plants. While all kinds of colours jumble across the canvases, conflicting concepts and forms of ‘life and death,’ ‘micro and macro,’ ‘war and peace,’ and ‘figurative and abstract,’ coalesce into a cohesive whole.
Kusama presents the next chapter of her practice in the latest series, Every Day I Pray for Love (2021-present), the subject of this exhibition. She updates her own expressive language with the appearance of ‘sentences’. Among her signature motifs such as nets, dots and profiles, Kusama often mixes marker pen and acrylic paints to create one or more circles on the canvas, within which she writes her own poems and messages in Japanese or English. These texts are filled with Kusama’s boundless longing for life and a desire to share her art with the world, all the while conscious of her own mortality. While some of the sentences are underlined and surrounded by polka dots, as if to confirm and emphasize each word, others are liberated from their semantics and symbolically incorporated as a form of letters and lines.
Spread across the walls of the other half of the gallery, are Kusama's recent wall relief sculptures, SOULS OF WOMEN THAT CONTINUE FOREVER (2019). The work showcases her distinctive visual style, characterized by repetitive patterns and vibrant colours. These pieces embody her exploration of infinity and eternity, symbolizing the enduring spirit of women. The use of organic shapes and rhythmic patterns creates a sense of movement and continuity, drawing viewers into a seemingly endless visual experience. Kusama's sculptural elements often blur the boundaries between two and three dimensions, adding a tactile, immersive quality to her work that deepens the viewer's engagement with the themes of resilience and timelessness.
Ota Fine Arts Singapore invites all to experience the remarkable oeuvre of Yayoi Kusama.
1) Do not touch the artworks
2) No eating and drinking inside the gallery
3) Children should not be unattended
4) No running and jumping
- Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat : 11:00 - 19:00
GILLMAN BARRACKS
