Yayoi Kusama retrospective

This retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum follows more than seven decades of Yayoi Kusama’s work, bringing together over 300 works across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, fashion and performance. What surprised me is how much bigger Kusama is than the visual language most of us immediately associate with her. Yes, there are polka dots, repetition and immersive spaces, but the exhibition goes back to her earliest work and shows where those ideas came from: nature, the body, infinity, sexuality, identity and her desire to dissolve the boundary between herself and the world around her. It also places her within the experimental art of the 1960s and her long relationship with the Stedelijk, where she began exhibiting during that decade. Seeing the work chronologically makes the dots feel less like a signature style and more like one part of a much larger, remarkably consistent artistic obsession.