Pipilotti Rist and Yayoi Kusama. Works from the Sammlung Goetz

June 27 – September 21, 2025
Neues Museum Nürnberg
 

The artists Pipilotti Rist and Yayoi Kusama create a sensual and colorful world with their works in the exhibition at the Neues Museum Nürnberg. Their works break taboos and craft new spaces for observing and exploring the human body.

The Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (*1962, Grabs) is one of the pioneers of media art. Since the 1990s, her videos and installations have developed a new visual idiom, creating immersive spaces for visitors to plunge into. With extreme close-ups of body parts, unusual perspectives and digital postprocessing, she renders familiar subject matter strange, altering the way we see the world. 

The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (*1929, Matsumoto) struggled to achieve such aesthetic freedoms. Her nude happenings, in which she adorned people, animals, and her surroundings with polka dots, led to serious scandals in the 1960s. Polka dots became the artist’s trademark.  The motif is related to the hallucinations that have plagued Kusama since childhood. During such episodes, Kusama actually sees her surroundings covered with dots. Over the course of her career, Kusama has developed a broad oeuvre, which includes painting, collage, sculpture, and installation.

In the exhibition Pipilotti Rist and Yayoi Kusama: Works from the Sammlung Goetz, these two artistic worlds collide and create new perspectives on two artists of different generations and backgrounds. Twenty-one works from the artists’ various creative phases include paintings, collages, sculptures, videos, and large-scale installations.