In his Portrait of the Artist as a mountebank, Jean Satrobinski showed us how since the nineteenth century the jester, the mountebank and the clown have been taken as an hyperbolic and deforming allegorical image by with some artists who have tried to show themselves and explain the nature of their work. A covert self-portrait that Yayoi Kusama has led to the end and claim as a caricature of itself, a sort of a risky and ridiculous epiphany – not in vain lived for years in a mental hospital –, which led her to reach the international recognition provided today by museums and critics.

This is the subject of the exhibition organized by the Museo Reina Sofía, the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum, which now arrive to New York in its last station. More than six decades of intense production – in March, kusama turned 83 years old and is still active - always halfway between Japan and the U.S., struggling herself for international recognition: today is recognized as a pioneer of feminist art at the same level as other artists like Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois or Nancy Spero.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. His immersion in traditional Japanese painting and the European vanguard, surprised late '50s, just in New York. His experiments with collage, performance, poetry and sculpture, received the recognition of critics and museums in the early '60s and, since the early '70s, her figure was linked to the main events of pop and minimalism movements associated to artists like Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Cornell.

His work covers an amazing variety of media. Quasi-abstract pictorial images, soft sculptures, accumulations, fantasy spaces and recurring patterns that have become the emblem of his deluded imagination. The exhibition, according to a strict chronological order, shows the intensity of her particular vision of the art world and how it has been formed. Obsessive images full of detail, as can be recognized in the report about the artist and his study published in the latest issue of our magazine. Alejandro Martínez

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