ART-PRESENTATION: Yayoi Kusama-Every Day I Pray For Love
One of the most influential artists of the 20TH AND 21ST Centuries, Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since her early assimilation of pop art and minimalism in the 1960s, she has created a highly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements, such as dots, to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Yayoi Kusama’s solo exhibition, “Every Day I Pray For Love”, at David Zwirner Gallery in New York features new paintings, new sculptures, an immersive installation, and the debut of “INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE” (2019). The exhibition introduces new paintings in the artist’s iconic “My Eternal Soul” series. Created in a more intimate format on view for the first time in the United States, these works are singular explorations of line and form. Minutely detailed, yet with bold explorations of color, they are at once abstract and figurative. Framed by the paintings and addressing a similar dialectic is a large, new floor-based constellation composed of almost a hundred different stainless-steel elements. Viewers navigate an all-encompassing environment of organic-looking, cloud-like forms whose reflections envelop its audience and reinforce an impression of perpetuity and infinity. An installation of new soft sculptures is also i=on presentation. Painted in a unified palette, these works likewise appear on the verge of figuration and denote the artist’s preoccupation throughout her career with accumulations of similar shapes. The gallery also debuts “INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE” (2019), which offers an immersive and poetic experience of endless space. The continuous mirroring of the flickering lights ultimately underscores Kusama’s determination throughout her art to convey an “eternal unlimited universe [and] the eternity of interrelationships”. The steel orbs also are back, in an installation reminiscent of Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden”, first staged at the Venice Biennale back in 1966. Kusama revisited the piece at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 2016, and in 2018 at Fort Tilden in Queens through a project with MoMA PS1. A display of the shiny balls was also among the highlights of this year’s Frieze New York, at the booth of London’s Victoria Miro Gallery. This time around, Kusama has created a new take on the historic piece by creating balls in varying sizes. At Yayoi Kusama’s last exhibition at with the gallery (2/11-16/12/17), 75,000 visitors showed up, a number more in line with Museum exhibitions than gallery shows. Guests waited in lines for up to six hours for a chance to spend just 60 seconds inside “INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM: LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER” an echo chamber of mirrored surfaces in which Kusama installed a peephole infinity room inside an infinity room, with reflective steel orbs strewn about the space. For the first time, the gallery will be open on Mondays for the run of the show, but only for school groups with appointments, offering local children the chance to experience Kusama’s interactive work. Once again, there will be a time limit inside the immersive installation.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 9/11-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Mon 10:00-18:00 (only school groups), Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
