Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern - review

Recently, they have overwhelmed vast flowers, pumpkins and giant inflatables with a cartoonish playfulness typical of Japanese kawaii cuteness. But the polka dots have troubling origins in Kusama's childhood hallucinations, and were once a tool of social protest, among other things.

Although dotty inflatable balls greet you outside Tate Modern's exhibition of 60 years of Kusama's work, much of it explores her work before the past two decades, retrieving her from confectionery-coloured kookiness and reaffirming her as a truly radical and pioneering figure.

The first two rooms are a revelation. They reveal Kusama's speedy escape from Japanese Nihonga traditions into an idiosyncratic adoption of Western modern art, in paintings heavy with the apocalyptic mood of post-atom bomb Japan. A group of drawings from the early Fifties are so densely woven and exquisite that they could occupy hours of your time. Influenced by surrealism, they see Kusama formulating her lifelong artistic language, including the polka dots.

She was drawn to the epicentre of the avant garde, New York, and began creating web-like abstract paintings of remarkable intensity, the Infinity Nets, formed from thousands of arcs of paint. The show's ensemble of seven of these paintings, all in white, is breathtaking in its calmness and obsessiveness.

A procession of rooms prove how ahead of her time Kusama was - creating room-filling installation art in 1963, using wallpaper three years before Andy Warhol, pioneering performance art and happenings, often with political overtones, and turning herself and her art into a global brand.
As that branding escalates from the Eighties, the show becomes uneven, and her most recent paintings, however remarkable in their vivid exuberance, lack the depth and delicacy of those early drawings. But in the crescendo, a mirrored room filled with twinkling multicoloured orbs, Kusama shows she can still make works of spellbinding beauty.

Until June 5 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)