Running up until March, the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art is celebrating the work of 82-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama with a major exhibition her new and recent works, Look Now, See Forever.
Kusama - a Conceptual artist and self-proclaimed ‘obsessive’ whose daring works has been dealing with notions of repetition and accumulation for decades - has been delighting corners of web this week with her 2002 project The Obliteration Room, which has been revived for the show.
Starting with a pristine, almost eerily white room complete with fixtures and furnishing, Kusama invited children to decorate it with a series of multi-coloured polka dot stickers.
Yayoi Kusama
The effect of The Obliteration Room – aside from producing some brilliantly contrasting images – is to encapsulate our feelings about childhood, as a sterile, boring scene is transformed into an explosion of colour by the collective imaginations of a set of marauding, excitable youngsters.
Since she started out as an artist in 1950s, Kusama’s work has sold for some of the highest prices in the world. In 2008 she sold a work in New York for $5.1m (£3.3m) – at the time, a record sum for a living female artist.
Kusama is set to be the subject of another retrospective here in Britain at the Tate Modern in London next month.
See how The Obliteration Room came together in this sequence of photographs: