ART-PREVIEW:Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late ‘50s, and by the mid-‘60s had become well known in the Avant-Garde world for her provocative happenings and exhibitions. Since this time, Kusama’s extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation, and environmental art as well as literature, fashion and product design.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Victoria Miro Archive

The new exhibition with works of Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro is spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden, the exhibition features new paintings, pumpkin sculptures, and mirror rooms, all made especially for this presentation. The artist has created three mirror rooms: “Pumpkin’s Infinity Mirrored Room”, “Chandelier of Grief” and “Where the Lights in My Heart Go”, all of which place the viewer within a universe of varying proliferating reflections. The pumpkin, another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also present in the form of new mirror polished sculptures. The paintings that are displayed alongside these immersive rooms continue an enduring preoccupation with multiplying polka dots and dense scalloped patterns of ‘infinity net’. The series of paintings “Eternal Soul”, which Kusama first began in 2009 each is a flatly painted monochrome field that abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, often in pulsating combinations of colour. Joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual, they testify to the indefatigable, paradoxical drive to expression that has unified Kusama’s constantly evolving oeuvre over seven decades.

Info: Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road, London, Duration: 25/5-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.victoria-miro.com