Image courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery

Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro Gallery

Unfolding across Victoria Miro Gallery’s three London locations and waterside garden, an exhibition by famed japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features a monumental collection of paintings, pumpkin sculptures, and mirror rooms created especially for this presentation. For this occasion Kusama has created three mirror rooms: “All the eternal love I have for the pumpkins”, “Chandelier of grief”, and “Where the lights in my heart go”.

Image courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery

The immersive kaleidoscopic expanses place viewers at the center of a universe of ever-changing impressions. Alongside the reflective rooms, new paintings continue Kusama’s lifelong preoccupation with the multiplicity of polka dots and scalloped “infinity net” patterns. Described by the artist as a form of “active self-obliteration”, the obsessive duplication of these forms on canvas is drawn from hallucinations she first experienced as a child. Finally, the pumpkin, which is another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also presented as new mirror polished sculptures.

Image courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery

At the Mayfair Gallery, new paintings are presented from Kusama’s ongoing series “My eternal soul”. Each of the works are flatly painted as a monochrome background, and are filled with imagery like eyes, faces, and indeterminate forms in often pulsating color combinations. Improvisatory, fluid and instinctual, these works emphasize Kusama’s constantly-evolving oeuvre over seven decades. She has developed a practice which, though it shares affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, the Zero and Nul movements, Eccentric Abstraction and Feminist art, resists any singular classification.

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Yayoi Kusama
Until July 30, 2016

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