Polka dots from another world

Yayoi Kusama has lived her life inside a bubble that has prevented her from truly experiencing what the rest of us know as reality. The most important living artist in Japan is 82 years old and has spent the last 34 in a psychiatric institution by choice. She claims that the only art she is interested in is her own, and that her work is the result of the hallucinations she has suffered since childhood.

Yet there was a time back in the 1960s when Kusama was the "in" girl in the New York pop art scene. It was not just because of her obsessive polka dot paintings, but also her street performances and her photographs, experimental films and happenings where she often appeared naked. Kusama was never afraid to expose herself. Only Andy Warhol was more notorious than her, and other artists like Frank Stella, Yves Klein and Donald Judd praised her work. Joseph Cornell had a close relationship with the beautiful and enigmatic Japanese artist. Yoko Ono and Haruki Murakami consider her an influence. But Kusama no longer remembers any of that, or does not wish to.

This week Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum opened a major exhibition on Yayoi Kusama that will later travel to the Pompidou in Paris, London's Tate Modern and the Whitney in New York.

"My life has been a never-ending struggle," she said in an email interview (Kusama did not travel to Madrid for the opening). Even though I had to fight a constant battle against obsession since I was a child, I have managed to overcome it through painting."

Born into a wealthy family from Nagano prefecture, she decided to study art in Kyoto in order to escape her conservative surroundings. Her first works have a surrealist air about them and play with abstraction. In 1958, she made a new and decisive jump toward the freedom that she needed, by moving to New York. Her hallucinations and obsessive impulses led her to paint gigantic canvases that she called Infinity nets and covered using uniform brush strokes with the same pattern and color on the entire surface.

"I painted nonstop day and night the same patterns on a canvas 10 meters long. The painting had no composition. When I was about to finish, I felt I had found my way as an artist, and that the dots had come into their own. [...] What I remember the most about that period in New York are the nets of white dots that surrounded me endlessly, making me their prisoner."

Polka dots have become her trademark. At the 2006 Singapore Biennale she painted trees red with white polka dots. She herself often dresses in showy polka dot suits and bright-colored wigs. "Polka dots appear in many of my childhood hallucinations. I transferred them onto a canvas to exercise my creativity."

Yayoi Kusama. Until September 18 at Museo Reina Sofía, C/ Santa Isabel, 52. Madrid