A new exhibition by Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
From 25 May to 30 July 2016.
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.
Victoria Miro Mayfair will present new paintings from the important ongoing series My 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.
Yayoi Kusama 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.
ALK3R 
Kusama, we love especially the mirror rooms! The repeating pattern into infinity from two bathroom mirrors always fascinated me, then I realized the stars we see at night are not what is out there now, and I want a computer extrapolation to show what is out there now deduced from the light years and what appears. But then I realized that if we could find a mirror or two in space reflecting our light back to us, we could literally see into the past! Visit my old blog “Seeing into the Past, way back in the archives, about third from the beginning at mmcdonald77. Maybe ALKR would find astronomer-artists to show what is out there now, (which is probably very similar to what we see anyway! ) There is a NASA attempt to show what they think from the Big Bang stuff, and from that I learned it is more than the 16 billion number they give us..