Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years

If the artistic sensibility is a kind of divine madness then Yayoi Kusama certainly fits the mould. Turning 80 on 29 March this year, the artist has lived by her own choice in a Tokyo mental health facility since committing herself in the mid-1970s. "If it were not for art," she has famously said, "I would have killed myself a long time ago."

That would have denied the world an exceptional body of work, celebrated this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the retrospective Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years. The exhibition, which comes direct from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, spans 70 years of art-making and includes paintings, installations, films of 1960s 'happenings', and a brand new series of 50 prints.

Judith Blackall, head of artistic programs at the MCA, is coordinating what will be the museum's first blockbuster show for 2009. "Kusama's work is visually very attractive and a lot of people recognise the dots," Blackall says. "It has an element of fun and design, so it's got a very broad appeal."

Kusama's profoundly zany work is equal parts Freud, Dr Seuss and Timothy Leary. Locals may remember her trippy installation at the 2000 Biennale of Sydney, Infinity Room - Phalli's Field (1965). This walk-in chamber with mirrored walls and ceiling was crammed with soft fabric phalluses covered in red dots - a universe of spotted dick. The work will be restaged at the retrospective along with another infinity room, Fireflies on the Water (2000), as well as Narcissus Garden (1966) - a gleaming expanse of stainless steel spheres.

"The earliest work in the show is a little drawing of a woman in a kimono that the artist did when she was ten," Blackall says. "The drawing has dots all over it." For Kusama, who has suffered from hallucinations all her life, the dots represent both the sun, or masculine energies of creation, and the moon, symbolising the feminine principle. Her fields of dots are either 'infinity dots' (positive) or 'infinity nets' (negative).

Born in Masumoto City, Nagano, Kusama studied traditional nihonga watercolour painting before moving to New York in 1958. She took a loft in Manhattan and quickly befriended artists such as Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg. Minimalism and abstract expressionism were hip, so when in 1959 she exhibited five large-scale infinity net paintings she made an instant splash. Through the 60s she staged a number of notorious performance art pieces involving public nudity, and even published a magazine entitled Kusama Orgy.

Despite the free spirit of the times Kusama suffered from extreme anxiety and in the 1970s returned to Japan, where she quietly faded from view. Her star rose again in the 90s, and she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale. "Today she's incredibly respected and among the world's greatest living contemporary artists," says Blackall.

While Kusama will not be attending (she has not left Japan for five years), her team of assistants will help install the show. "This exhibition has made me understand what an extraordinary artist and person this woman is," says Blackall. "She was born during the war in an incredibly traditional society so she must have had an amazing drive and belief in her work, and I hope this exhibition will deliver that to audiences here in Sydney."

More art, art galleries and exhibitions in Sydney? Sign up to our weekly newsletter