Yayoi Kusama, born Japan 1929, active USA and Japan
Untitled (Ironing Board)
Stuffed fabric, steam iron, ironing board, paint

Yayoi Kusama is a remarkably versatile artist whose painting, sculpture, installation, and performance work is marked by her obsessions. During her childhood, Kusama had a recurring hallucination, which she later recalled as follows: “One day I was looking at the red flower of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.

In 1958 Kusama moved to New York and in the early 1960s she began to work on a series called “Accumulation and Compulsion Furniture.” Initially consisting of a simple armchair that he covered with a fantastic growth of white upholstered forms, the project soon expanded to include diverse pieces of furniture, including a dining-room table, a bureau, a sofa, and mirrors. Kusama laboriously sewed, stuffed, and painted canvases to create hundreds of phallic protrusions that seem to flow over or wriggle away. In a 1965 exhibition, she moved into the realm of installation, using what became her signature polka dots to decorate the stuffed phalluses, which were placed in a mirrored room to give the illusion of an endless surreal field of objects.

In this work, an ironing board becomes absurd and threatening. The steam iron, placed face down on the board, seems about to scorch and flatten the sea of erect phalluses covering the surface. Dealing with question of identity and sexuality, Kusama expresses her fear of male domination and attempts to symbolically possess and defy patriarchal authority.

~  Israel Museum, Jerusalem, February 24, 2015

1 in 3 women is a victim of sexual violence in Israel. 

See:
Report: Every third Israeli woman falls victim to sexual assault
There are many other sources that support this statistic