Accumulation

“I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this obliteration.” Yayoi Kusama.

The idea of accumulation in Kusama’s art is not just an obsessive and compulsive tendency or an innate desire for repetition, but can be understood as a yearning for expansion impelled by the need to make her creative vision grow. After her Infinity Net paintings, Kusama developed her Accumulation series in collages of reused pieces of paper and soft sculptures with repetitive forms. In these works, an everyday object like a chair is transformed through the accumulation of large numbers of stuffed and sewn phallic tubers, which make the object itself disappear together with its function. Little by little, the compulsive desire to multiply these soft forms led Kusama to expand her vision through her infinity mirror rooms in beginning in 1965, and through silver or patterned fabrics in the 70s and 80s, such as Accumulation of Hands (1980) where a sofa and chairs are enwrapped by hundreds of silver gloves.