Published by David Zwirner Books in autumn 2020, Every Day I Pray for Love offers an immersive insight into Yayoi Kusama's visual and written practice. Compact in size, its pages are printed using eight colours, ensuring that the images within are vividly reproduced and remain true to the original artworks. Every featured painting is accompanied by a full-bleed detail, often placed next to one another to reflect the close manner in which Kusama often hangs her works.
Within the layouts, we were keen to emphasise and celebrate the poetic tone that Kusama often takes with her work titles, setting them in oversized sans serif type in contrast to the classic, diminutive caption approach. The publication features poetry written by Kusama throughout her career, and to reflect this breadth of scope we chose to include portraits of the artist spanning many decades, with early portraits at the beginning of the book ranging to more contemporary images at the end. The cover of the publication features bespoke lettering designed by APFEL, screen printed in neon green for an exaggeratedly bold effect within the constraints of its small format.
We chose a lighter weight of Banana Grotesk for these titles – a warm sans serif typeface that works well at a larger size and in uppercase, to suit the capitalised approach Kusama takes to her titling.
