Image: The ZERO artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker at a vernissage at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1962. Inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.V.79_1, Vorlass Heinz Mack, ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf. Photo: Raoul van den Boom, VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2025
Two works by Yayoi Kusama are on view at the Olaf Gulbransson Museum in Tegernsee in the special exhibition ‘ZERO Eine internationale Künstlerbewegung 1957-1966’, which has run since March 2026 and closes on 6 September 2026. In a newsletter dated 28 August 2026 the museum reported that Kusama died on 14 August 2026.
The two works are ‘Sea’ (1991), lacquer on cardboard, and ‘Far End of silver Clouds’ (1978), spray on cardboard. According to the museum, the loans in the exhibition come from private collections, the ZERO foundation in Düsseldorf and the MACK FOUNDATION.
The museum describes Kusama as a Japanese avant-garde artist who devoted her life to an international career, closely connected to the ZERO movement in the 1960s and active in Düsseldorf. Its exhibition text places her in the open international network that formed around Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, alongside Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana. The newsletter notes that recent large exhibitions in Basel, Cologne and, currently, Amsterdam had brought renewed attention to her work.
The exhibition closes with a joint tour led by curator Michael Beck and cultural journalist Sonja Still on Sunday, 6 September 2026, at 1 p.m. The roughly one-hour event costs €25 including admission and is limited to between 10 and 20 participants, with reservation requested by telephone or email.
The Olaf Gulbransson Museum stands at Kurgarten 5 in Tegernsee, in a building designed by Sep Ruf and opened in 1966. The building and a substantial part of its holdings passed to the Free State of Bavaria in 1974, creating a branch gallery of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich; the nonprofit Olaf Gulbransson Gesellschaft e.V. administers and operates the museum in cooperation with the state collections. Its permanent display is devoted to Olaf Gulbransson and the satirical journal ‘Simplicissimus’.
The museum’s next special exhibition, ‘Tony Cragg – Zeichnungen und Skulpturen’, runs from 19 September 2026 to 14 February 2027. The vernissage takes place the previous evening, 18 September, at 5 p.m. in the music pavilion in the Kurgarten beside the museum, moving to the Baroque hall of Tegernsee Castle in bad weather, and the exhibition can be seen free of charge that day from 3 to 7 p.m. The drawings, watercolours and sculptures, spanning more than 50 years of the artist’s work, were selected by Cragg himself.
