The Little Mermaid: A Fairy Tale of Infinity and Love Forever

Yayoi Kusama's delicate and unique line drawings provide new readings of Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale.

The Little Mermaid (1839) is a story about a girl from the sea who followed her dreams and suffered a disastrous fate on land. This familiar story is brought to new life in this wonderful edition, a collaboration between the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and artist Yayoi Kusama.

Paired with Hans Christian Andersen’s original text, the densely patterned, undulating line drawings of Kusama’s Love Forever series (2004–7) conjure up storms in the roiling waves of the ocean, the Little Mermaid’s vast underwater kingdom and her longing to live in the human world. Kusama’s fertile, endlessly repeating forms are an ideal match for the poetic and disturbing universe evoked in the fairy tale; the result is a true collaboration. Kusama’s drawings both illustrate and interpret Andersen’s story, bringing it to terrifying life, and Andersen’s words lend narrative content to Kusama’s landscapes of unblinking eyes, curling tendrils and disembodied profiles.

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist and writer, whose work is often instantly recognisable in its use of psychedelic colours, repetition, and pattern. An important figure in the avant-garde, she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, soft sculpture, performance art, film and environmental installations. Kusama is acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to have come out of Japan.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish master of the literary fairy tale whose stories achieved wide renown. He is also the author of plays, novels, poems, travel books, and several autobiographies.

• Dimensions 33.6 x 20.7 x 1.9 cm
• ISBN 9788792877598
• Hardback Yes
• Number of illustrations 48
• Publisher Louisiana
• No of pages 96