The ache of not having become European Capital of Culture 2025 sits deeply in Hannover. The director of the Sprengel Museum, Reinhard Spieler, spoke of it several times as he presented to the media the major exhibition on Niki de Saint Phalle, Yayoi Kusama, and Takashi Murakami.
“Love You for Infinity,” so the title borrowed from a Jaymes Young pop song, achieves a new standard that guarantees international visibility for the museum—and for the city of Hannover. “We are the European Capital of Culture,” Spieler’s confident yet concise conclusion.
But what is there in the twelve thematically arranged rooms, including the large-volume rotating exhibition hall, on roughly 2,000 square meters to see? Of the around 120 works from painting, sculpture and installation, applied arts, as well as video, about half come from the Sprengel’s own collection of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). For she bequeathed about 450 works to the Sprengel Museum 25 years ago.
It was her thanks for the city’s loyalty and its love for her work. Here she could realize what was probably her first major public-art project in 1974: three lush, colorful Nanas at Hohe Ufer. For Expo 2000 she was allowed to transform a ruinous grotto in the Herrenhäuser Baroque Garden with color-glass and mirror-mosaic as well as individual figures into a fantastical biotope. Hannover, in turn, showed its gratitude for the gift with honorary citizenship—for, embarrassingly, the only woman thus far.
Thousands of Tiny Hearts and the Joy of Life
When Niki de Saint Phalle now enters into the artistic trialogue with roughly her age-mate Yayoi Kusama, born 1929, and the considerably younger Takashi Murakami, born 1962, the initial impression seems coherent. The works of the three teem with optimistic brightness, declarations of love with thousands of little hearts, and a joie de vivre including consumer desire.
Niki’s lush Nanas join Kusama’s colorful polka dots and her mirror-worlds, or Murakami’s Emoji-Flower wallpaper and his male fantasy of a three-meter-tall girl that seems to consist only of butt and enormous bosoms. And all of this is appetizingly staged in color-coordinated rooms: pink, orange, turquoise, deep blue.
But with Niki, as she branded herself, this impression breaks at once. One must not interpret her spectacular shooting-paintings made between 1961 and 1963 — semi-sculptural objects into which paint bags or eggs were embedded so that, when fired, they bleed and overflow the surface — as kitchen-psychology protests against patriarchy, a male-dominated art market, or a repressed postwar society.
In her engagement with the zeitgeist forms of participatory happenings or American Action Painting, the self-taught Niki pursued radically individual paths. In retrospect she viewed these as therapy and meaning-making after a life crisis. For years certain works had already become crystallization points in Sprengel Museum’s thematic exhibitions, revealing depths of the soul.
Around 2013, her shooting-picture “Old Master (Petit Tir)” was a fundamental position in considering calculated chance in Modern art. In 2017 about 25 drawings and graphics served as fictive letters, offering insights into her troubled private and romantic life. In 2016 there was a solo exhibition that also highlighted the darker sides of her oeuvre, such as her handling of sexualized violence through art.
“Niki. Kusama. Murakami. Love You for Infinity: bis 14. 2. 26, Sprengel-Museum Hannover, sprengel-museum.de
Yayoi Kusama also began with a scandal in the art world. Without an invitation to the Venice Biennale, she presented herself there in 1966 among 1,500 mirrored spheres: her “Narcissus Garden” was a critique of the self-satisfaction of the industry. From then on her brand flourished, unmistakably with a fondness for the decorative.
She has lived for a long time, at her own request, in a psychiatric clinic, yet is probably the most famous contemporary Japanese artist. She, like her compatriot Murakami, did not shy away from collaborating with the French luxury label Louis Vuitton. Kusama’s colorful dots overlay the traditional monogram on a brown background.
Murakami translates the two letters into cheerful color and ornament and fuses high and popular culture as well as commerce. But from his flowers with a playful face can also arise a collection of skulls, as he demonstrated in his painting “Blue Life Force” in 2012. Abysses, one learns, lurk even beneath the most optimistic surface.
