Yayoi Kusama - Rare historic mid 1960s "Floor Show" invitation announcement at Richard Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965

Yayoi Kusama - Rare historic mid 1960s "Floor Show" invitation announcement at Richard Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965

Offset lithograph poster, bearing Richard Castellane Gallery's distinctive stamp logo

Scarce and absolutely historic original exhibition poster invitation for Yayoi Kusama’s seminal 1965 exhibition at the Richard Castellane Gallery on Madison Avenue in York City – bearing Castellane Gallery's original official stamp on the verso.
This work has been framed in a museum quality painted wood frame under UV plexiglass, with a circular die-cut window in the back to reveal the distinctive Castellane Gallery logo.
Provenance: Estate of Richard Castellane
Measurements:
Framed
28.5 inches (vertical) by 23.5 inches (horizontal) by 2 inches
Poster
21 inches (vertical) by 16 inches (horizontal)
Background/Discussion
In November 1965, Yayoi Kusama debuted her historic "Floor Show" exhibition at the Castellane Gallery in New York City. The gallery was exclusively owned and operated by Richard Castellane, a pioneering Ivy league educated art dealer and Renaissance man who opened the venue on Madison Avenue in 1959. Castellane champion-funded Kusama’s career, actively sold her art, and personally amassed a massive collection of her pieces. (He also hosted groundbreaking exhibitions by artists such as Robert Smithson). Castellane described Kusama as entirely "fearless" and "gutsy," noting that she never demonstrated self-doubt despite navigating a highly exclusionary, white, male-dominated 1960s art market

Kusama’s 1965 "Floor Show" was one of the most vital moments in modern art history because it introduced the world's first-ever immersive mirror installation: Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field.
The Installation: Inside an enclosed room, the floor was covered with hundreds of stuffed, fabric phallic sculptures adorned with bright red polka dots. By lining the walls with mirrors, Kusama generated an optical illusion of an endless, repeating sea of forms.
As is the case with much of Kusama’s contemporary work, the recent Infinity Rooms find their origin in the 1960s. In 1965 Kusama showed her first fully immersive Environment, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show) at the Castellane Gallery in New York. The work was a new direction for the artist, who had been playing with the concept of infinity throughout the late fifties and early sixties and whose most recent work was mainly soft sculpture.3 Kusama brought these concepts together in Phalli’s Field to create a space in which visitors could fully lose themselves as they were endlessly reflected between stuffed phalli covered with red polka dots. After Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show) Kusama went on to experiment more with the use of mirrors in her work to allow her viewers to experience infinity.

The Concept: The exhibition allowed Kusama to translate her signature two-dimensional "Infinity Nets" into a physical, three-dimensional space. It subverted her intense psychological obsessions, her fear of sex, and her desire for "self-obliteration" into a participatory environment. The playful, erotic, and deeply avant-garde nature of the exhibition instantly shocked the public and drew heavy media and press

We all know about Yayoi Kusama – one of the most famous and consequential artists of the past 60 years. But Richard H. Castellane, one of her earliest champions, was an absolutely fascinating art world figure - a highly eccentric, multi-talented American art dealer, lawyer, author, and independent filmmaker. Beyond discovering legendary artists, his fascinations led him to live a colorful, non-traditional life far outside the boundaries of the elite Manhattan art circle. He studied art and archeology as an undergraduate at Princeton University, then got a law degree and studied art history with the legendary historian Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University.

Castellane played a definitive role in Kusama's 1960s New York career by providing her with immense creative freedom and structural support. Following her early avant-garde success, Castellane signed a deal to host a trio of foundational solo exhibitions for her. The 1965 Floor show was the second of the three: (1) "Driving Image Show" (1964): An environmental installation featuring domestic furniture, mannequins, and dry macaroni coated in phallic shape; (2) "Floor Show" (1965): The introduction of her mirror installations’; (3) "Peep Show" / "Endless Love Show" (1966): A subsequent evolution of her mirrored rooms

Crucially, Castellane was also an avid collector of Kusama’s work. When Kusama moved from Japan to the United States in the late 1950s, she brought roughly 2,000 early drawings and watercolors. Castellane acquired a staggering number of these early pieces directly from her. Decades later, his extensive holdings formed the basis for major museum retrospectives, including the highly celebrated traveling museum exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Early Drawings from the Collection of Richard Castellane, which toured from 2000 to 2002

On his farm in upstate New York, Castellane opened his home to the immigrant community and adopted several young, adult Mongolian immigrants as his legal children. One of his adopted sons cared for him deeply in his final years and traveled to Mongolia after Castellane's death to scatter his ashes into the River of Genghis Khan as per his wishes.

More information about this historic poster:
A dizzying poster of Kusama's iconic polka-dotted soft sculptures, advertising the opening of the 1965 installation at the Castellane Gallery of her first ever mirror room, produced by Castellane Gallery in 1965.

Kusama's exhibition, titled in full "Infinity Mirror Room —Phalli's Field (Floor Show)," was documented in a series of photographs of the artist reclining on her own "phallus meadow" in a red leotard — the most famous and striking images of her work from that era. In her autobiography, Kusama describes the installation that marked the beginning of arguably her best-known and most popular series of works: "The walls of the room were mirrors, and sprouting from the floor were thousands of white canvas phallic forms covered with red polka dots. The mirrors reflected them infinitely, summoning up a sublime, miraculous field of phalluses. People could walk barefoot through the phallus meadow, becoming one with the work and experiencing their own figures and movement as part of the sculpture. Wandering into this infinite wonderland, where a grandiose aggregation of human sexual symbols had been transformed into a humorous, polka-dotted field, viewers found themselves spellbound by the imagination as it exorcised sexual sickness in the naked light of day." The New York Times described Kusama's mid-'60s work as the "awful vision of a self-perpetuating infinity.An important association of this scarce document for an early and landmark show from this major artist – bearing the distinctive logo and stamp of the Castellane Gallery.