Pop-up exhibition Vincent Hall Amsterdam
2–4/10/
2026
2026
2–4/10/
2026
2026
Why Kusama looks like Kusama
The familiar answer is biography: hallucinations, obsessive states, the psychiatric clinic. That is half the story.
The other half is four centuries of Japanese printmaking. Flatness, repeating ornament, seriality, rhythm and an absorption in surface existed in Japanese art long before Kusama.
The other half is four centuries of Japanese printmaking. Flatness, repeating ornament, seriality, rhythm and an absorption in surface existed in Japanese art long before Kusama.
The exhibition places her lithographs alongside lifetime impressions by Hokusai, Utamaro, Kunisada and Hiroshige. The comparison is not between individual works but between a pictorial language and its continuation in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
One of the central threads is Hiroshige, Van Gogh and Kusama. The West has learned from the Japanese woodblock print once before. Van Gogh collected these prints and copied Hiroshige, among them Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake. Impressions of both compositions are shown in the exhibition.
In Amsterdam, the city of the Van Gogh Museum, this history carries particular weight. It allows Kusama to be seen not as an isolated phenomenon but as the continuation of a tradition that has already changed European art once.
In Amsterdam, the city of the Van Gogh Museum, this history carries particular weight. It allows Kusama to be seen not as an isolated phenomenon but as the continuation of a tradition that has already changed European art once.
The prints on display are lifetime impressions — sheets pulled during the artists' own lifetimes, of the kind their contemporaries, collectors and nineteenth-century European artists, Van Gogh among them, saw and held.
Tickets options
Admission to the exhibition is free with registration. All accompanying events require separate tickets.
About the speaker
Alexander Sheremetev is an art historian and researcher specialising in the symbolism, ornament and visual culture of Japan. He has worked with museums for over twenty years, curating private and public collections, developing university courses and advising private projects. He lectures and writes, situating aesthetic form within its historical, philosophical and structural context.
Please note: this event is held in Russian
The tours and lectures are conducted in Russian, without interpretation or subtitles. The exhibition itself — wall texts, work captions and printed materials — is available in English.
