From the Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she voluntarily secluded herself in 1977 trying to escape the hallucinations that had haunted her since she was a child, Yayoi Kusama has become the most popular, beloved and sought-after artist of our time. The polka dots and colorful motifs that now invade streets, museums, and luxury stores all over the planet (Louis Vuitton adopted them to stamp bags, skirts, or bikinis), make it difficult to even imagine that this auction champion, the most sought-after artist in the world, world, remained outside the history of art for decades and, above all, that behind its childish-looking mirrors, pumpkins and colored lights is actually hidden an indefatigable and painful attempt to escape from its inner demons. “She is not an ‘outsider’ although she has never felt comfortable in her own skin and throughout her life art has offered her a path to lose herself”, sums up Doryun Chong, one of the curators of Yayoi Kusama: from 1945 to today, a retrospective that brings together more than 200 works at the Guggenheim Bilbao, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and videos of her performances.

At 94, Kusama retains his childish appearance and goes to work every day at his studio, a stone’s throw from the hospital where he lives, but he hardly lets himself be seen in public. In the Bilbao exhibition, organized together with the M in Hong Kong, where 280,000 people visited the exhibition, some of his latest works can be seen, cheerful and colorful paintings whose format is reduced in size due to their physical limitations to the same extent It intensifies your celebration of life. Nothing to do with the darkness of his first self-portraits, like that flesh-pink sunflower floating over a human mouth from 1950, taken when he was 21 years old and had not yet left Japan.

Born in 1929 into a wealthy Matsumoto family that owned flower nurseries, as a child she would go to the seed-growing fields with her sketchpad and sit among the flowers. Until one day the violets began to speak to him. “She thought only humans could talk, so she surprised me that violets were using words. She was so terrified that her legs began to shake”, she would later recall in the Heather Lenz Kusama documentary: Infinite.

It was the first of a series of hallucinations and panic attacks that would haunt her traumatic childhood, between a philandering father and a mother who sent her to spy on her lovers and then unleashed all her rage on her, destroying her drawings. Some of those who were saved – she herself would burn more than 2,000 near a river – can be seen in the Bilbao exhibition, which is also curated by the specialist Mika Yoshitake and Lucía Agirre, who have designed a route that is both thematic and chronological, emphasizing the philosophy that runs through all his work: the idea of ??the infinite, accumulation, radical connectivity, death or the force of life.

In the exhibition there are great installations, such as Self-obliteration (a concept that refers to the liberation of the individual through the destruction of the self), a room with infinite mirrors and colored lights that will delight lovers of selfies and there are even red polka dots floating in the pond next to the estuary, but it is undoubtedly in the photographs and videos of her New York period where we find the most surprising and radical Kusama, who in the sixties turned to soft sculptures, objects everyday things like chairs, sofas or shoes into which he sewed a multitude of penises and phallic protuberances (“sexual obsession and fear of sex sit on each side of me”, he writes in his memoir La red infinita, Ediciones B) .

The one who, naked, enters the MoMA to officiate a “great orgy to wake the dead”, the one who organizes happenings in which bands of followers recruited through newspaper ads frolicked naked while she smeared their bodies with moles. The one who officiates the first homosexual wedding, for which she created a suit for two, sold polka dot fashion designs in a boutique, with holes in the breasts and buttocks, and offered sexual services to Nixon in exchange for the ceasefire in Vietnam . “Calm your manly fighting spirit!” she wrote to him in a letter.