Brandi Linn
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Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who has become an Instagram favorite in her 90s with her whimsical sculptures of pumpkins, polka dots and endless kaleidoscopic rooms, is the subject of a blockbuster retrospective heading to Australia.
In December, the National Gallery of Victoria will present one of its most extensive exhibitions to date, with eight decades of work by Kusama (now 95 years old) on display across the gallery’s ground floor.
The retrospective will extend from the gallery’s interiors to the Federation Court, and will include a yet-unseen Kusama installation beneath the waterfalls of the building’s familiar water wall.
Among the 180 works on display will be at least one new “hall of infinite mirrors”: a room of mirrors, polka dots and colored lights that reflect forever. It is these immersive kaleidoscopic works, representing Kusama’s lifelong exploration of self-destruction and the infinity of space, that have earned her the title of the world’s most Instagrammable artist.
With more than 20 mirror rooms around the world, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC made history in 2022 when it displayed six of the rooms in a single exhibition. After seven months on display the museum was forced to expand the exhibition twicesuch was the demand of the public.
The NGV hasn’t definitively said how many infinity rooms Melbourne will have yet, but NGV senior curators Wayne Crothers and Miranda Wallace have suggested it will be more than six.
The exhibition will also allow Australia to see for the first time a newly acquired dancing pumpkin, one of three Kusama has recently created and the first to be displayed at the New York Botanical Garden in 2021.
“It’s a very different pumpkin than the iconic pumpkin that everyone knows,” Crothers said.
“It is a new version of the pumpkin… a huge piece that rises from the ground, almost five meters high and about seven meters wide. “It’s almost like some kind of huge pavilion that you can walk through.”
Kusama has been painting and sculpting pumpkins since she was a child, growing up in a plant nursery and seed farm in Hirohito’s militarized Japan. It is believed that the Alice in Wonderland surrealism of her work developed at a young age after she began experiencing hallucinations. According to the 2018 documentary Kusama: Infinity, the artist used art to make sense of her mental confusion and childhood abuse.
His obsession with self-destruction began to mature once he arrived in New York, creating his first room with infinity mirrors in 1965.
The following year, she invited herself to the Venice Biennale and set up what she described as her “kinetic carpet” outside the host country’s pavilion. Her Narcissus Garden, made up of hundreds of mirrored spheres, was sold by the artist ball by ball for $2 each, until the biennial authorities put an end to it.
In an exhibition that pays tribute to Kusama’s eight decades of paintings, sculptures, installations, writing and activism, the NGV exhibition will include a new version of the Narcissus Garden that will include 1,400 reflective silver balls.
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Kusama was commenting on the commercialization of art at the time, Wallace said, saying that her interpretation of the Narcissus Garden for the NGV would be “kind of a remake… for the 21st century.”
Visitors would be asked to make donations so that NGV could purchase the work for its collection, a strategy the gallery used in 2018 that allowed it to acquire Salvador Dalí’s 1946 painting Desert Trilogy: Mirage, costing more than 5 million dollars.
The nonagenarian artist will not attend the opening of her Australian retrospective. Kusama has rarely traveled outside Japan since she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric facility outside Tokyo in the 1970s. She travels the short distance every day to her studio, where she continues her artistic practice, which has focused in painting since the early 2000s.
Works created in his childhood and those created this year will be included in the retrospective.
“The advantage of seeing this enormous longevity of the practice is that you begin to understand how these connections exist between works from the ’50s and ’60s to the present,” Wallace said.
“It is an interesting journey and that is why we have dedicated this space to it. It is an expansive story.”
Yayoi Kusama will open at the NGV on December 15.
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