“Even Better Than the Real Thing”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, March 20 – August 11, 2024
Whitney Biennial 2024
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Yayoi Kusama, “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”
David Zwirner Gallery, New York, May 11 – Friday, July 21, 2023
Yayoi Kusama is one of Japanese Pop-Art’s leading lights, combining monumental works with a minimal, feminist, and conceptual blend of sculpture and painting. Her signature gesture is a field of dots, in the case of this show applied to monumental abstracted squash / biomorphic shapes. The effects range from bland to transcendent.
The New York Times comments on her instagram-perfect immersive scenarios:
“It’s a beautiful effect. (Or it was for me, alone in the room; you’ll be sharing the experience with up to three other visitors at a time.) But you needn’t be Dr. Freud to diagnose that the narcissism of a new selfie-devoted public has canceled, utterly, the goals of self-obliteration that Ms. Kusama intends her infinite installations to achieve. The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.”
“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Raffish Vulnerability and Profane Ambivalence”
Pen + Brush, New York, June 15 to August 26 2023
“‘Bodies’ represents the authentic and earnest ways in which these artists buck convention so thoroughly that the final product appears unabashed, even crude. The body is literally what binds us, yet here, and contemporarily, it also separates us as we inevitably react to this public and radical display. This show forces viewers to reckon with their own perspectives, values, boundaries, and biases” -Curator Parker Daley Garcia.