Yayoi Kusama’s fascinating mirror room installations are currently on exhibit at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. 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. This is the artist’s most extensive exhibition at the gallery to date, and it is the first time mirror rooms have gone on view in London since Kusama’s major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012.
Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong exploration of the self’s relationship to the infinite cosmos has given rise to a highly influential career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. For the exhibition at the Wharf Road galleries, she 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, all of which place the viewer within a universe of varying proliferating reflections.
New paintings displayed alongside these immersive rooms continue an enduring preoccupation with multiplying polka dots and dense scalloped ‘infinity net’ patterns – Kusama’s obsessive repetition of these forms on canvas, which she has described as a form of active self-obliteration, responds to hallucinations first experienced in childhood. The pumpkin, another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also present in the form of new mirror polished sculptures.
Thru July 30, 2016, at 16 Wharf Road London, free admission.
All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016
Wood, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED
292.4 x 415 x 415 cm
Where the Lights in My Heart Go, 2016
Stainless steel, aluminium
300 x 300 x 300 cm
Installation View, Yayoi Kusama
Installation View, Yayoi Kusama
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All images courtesy of Victoria Miro. Featured image: Chandelier of Grief, 2016
Steel, alumunium, one-way mirror, acrylic, chandelier, motor, plastic, LED.
