Melburnians may have spotted that their Arts Precinct has been sprinkled with polka dots since summer.
Yayoi Kusama — the largest ever collection of the artist's work in Australia, showing at the National Gallery of Victoria until April 21 — could hardly be contained within the walls of the NGV.
Over the past three months, Kusama's work has been creeping into the city through pink wrapped trees, and in spotty gift-shop tote bags slung over the shoulders of commuters.
The 96-year-old Japanese artist has been named one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential artists, nicknamed the "princess of polka dots" by decades of crowds drawn to her dotty dancing pumpkins.
With more than 376,000 visitors so far, according to the NGV, tickets are sold with the promise of Instagram-worthy immersive rooms and polished sculptures that allow you to move through a Kusama painting.
Yet the artist's early works are no less impressive.
The exhibit is split into two parts, with the first reaching back into the artist's early life.
It opens with the oldest surviving example of Kusama's signature spots, a small sketch of a woman assumed to be Kusama's mother.
Walking through room upon room of artwork, many things emerge as polka dots and repetitions. Whether it's Accumulations of corpses from her childhood during World War II, or Accumulations of penises, or of dots, or of mirrors you can spot your own face in, the repetitions are infinite.
Kusama's vision accompanies the work:
“Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.”
These earlier works contrast with gleaming sculptures from recent decades that are distinctly homemade.
Every hand-painted dot and puckered stitch in the phallic textile Accumulations visibly accredit the artist's labour.
A mirrored hallway opens the second part of the exhibition, showcasing works from the 1980s onwards.
Viewers could easily spend four hours walking through the show.
As one spectator was overheard saying, "I kept thinking the exhibition had ended, but every hallway had more and more wild colours at the end."
Another visitor said she loved viewing how Kusama returned to the same themes throughout her life: "One moment its collections of stickers, then the dots appear as eyes, as sperm, as strange creatures and pumpkins."
Kusama is an artist widely known — both caricatured and beloved — for her distinctive red wig and eccentric fashion.
Yet the NGV exhibition presents an opportunity to watch the artist evolve from the 1930s to today.
She is displayed as a woman who used her artistic practice to reconcile her identity as an individual in post-WWII Japan and America, and who continues to do so in today's world.
