This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: The 1950s and 1960s: Paintings, Sculpture, Works on Paper at Paula Cooper Gallery, May 3–June 21, 1996.

Whatever the medium or scale—intimate watercolors or huge oil paintings, a single high-heeled shoe or a room-size environment—Kusama uses single units to construct the repetitive patterns that consume her. Interlacing arcs compose her Infinity Nets paintings; myriad phallic forms made of sewn-and-stuffed cloth cover the found domestic objects of her Accumulation and Compulsion Furniture series; and later she united the nude bodies of those who participated in her free-love, anti-war happenings of the late 1960s by spraying them all with polka dots. Indisputably, Kusama’s baroque psychosexual art of the late 1950s and 1960s are significant in late modernism for embellishing Minimalism’s modular or grid-like structure with autobiographical, psychological and sexual content.