Few visual patterns in contemporary art are as immediately recognizable as Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots. They have covered , , , and . Even after her death at 97 was announced last week, her dots will remain the visual shorthand by which millions know her work.
The dots are playful enough to delight children and unmistakable enough to function as a global brand. Yet they came from a darker place: the hallucinations, obsessive thoughts and fear of self-obliteration that Kusama described as following her from childhood.
for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, ahead of a major Scandinavian retrospective at in Stockholm, I asked what the dots meant to her. The interview was published in Swedish; her original answers quoted here have not previously appeared in English.
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