Yayoi Kusama, regarded as a living icon of Japanese art, was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, and graduated from the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. She moved to New York City in 1957 and began to emerge as a leading avant-garde artist. She now lives in Tokyo, Japan. She has participated in group exhibitions with other contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns.

Yayoi Kusama stands alone in modern art—distinctive, highly original, and widely admired. The poster’s subject, Self-Obliteration No. 2 (1967), comes from Kusama’s formative years in New York in the 1960s, when new artistic movements such as Pop art and Minimalism were taking shape.

Kusama was part of this environment, but from her position as a non-Western woman artist, she developed an entirely unique artistic world that today represents an important and profoundly original contribution to postwar art.

In recent decades, Yayoi Kusama has become known worldwide for her brightly colored, wide-ranging patterns of polka dots, with striking contrasts of black and yellow or white and red.

Within this infinite visual universe stands Yayoi Kusama herself: a vivid artistic persona who appears not only behind her work but, more often, in front of it. In photographs, she usually wears the same patterns as the work—an artistic camouflage that visually merges her with her art.