Adrian Searle 

Obsession gone dotty

Now in her 70s, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is a legend. This exhibition spans her career, yet somehow fails to give the full measure. It is still a terrific, troubling show. Her work is a conundrum.
  
  


Now in her 70s, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is a legend. This exhibition spans her career, yet somehow fails to give the full measure. It is still a terrific, troubling show. Her work is a conundrum.

In the 50s she moved from Japan to New York, had an affair with Donald Judd and a relationship with an adoring Joseph Cornell. She filled vast canvases with thousands of white-on-white whorls, canvases which, though extremely beautiful, are frightening, when one considers the obsessiveness of their manufacture. Kusama covered canvases in the dots she had begun to see in hallucinations, and which spilled from her paintings onto shop mannequins, her own naked body and the garments she designed.

Part of her paradox is that she could make works so delicate as the white paintings (Judd called them "solid lace"), and go on to perform quaintly exhibitionistic naked street Happenings, to make inflatable vinyl environments, to replace the dot with dry pasta, and to exhibit shoes stuffed with phalluses. It is her forms, rather than the nature of her obsessions, which mutate. This is wonderful, vulgar, an art that overcomes difficulty by its accommodation.

• Until March 19. Information: 0171-402 6075

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible

 

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