Yayoi Kusama is one of the most famous contemporary artists in the contemporary art world. Her magnetic, color-filled works have piqued the curiosity of an audience that has grown over the decades, as a result of major commissions and even successful collaborations.
All the exhibitions dedicated to Yayoi Kusama to see this year
One of the most popular names in contemporary art in recent decades, Yayoi Kusama and her work have become pop icons this year through a partnership with Louis Vuitton. And while she has been living a reclusive life for nearly 50 years, museums around the world are celebrating her with sold-out exhibitions.
Narcissus Garden, from São Paulo, Brasil. Photo by mishmoshimoshi from wikimedia commons
Visitor experiencing Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe (2018), part of the 2022 exhibition One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo by Matailong Du. Wood and glass mirrored room with paper lanterns, 119 5/8 x 245 1/8 x 245 1/8 in. (304 x 622.4 x 622.4 cm). Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Purchased jointly by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2020), and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, with funds from the George B. and Jenny R. Mathews Fund, by exchange.
Death of Nerves, photo by Choo Yut Shing on Flickr
Yayoi Kusama © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, Ota Fine Arts, and Victoria Miro
Yayoi Kusama and Dots Obsession, 1996-2011 Installation view: The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner.
Yayoi Kusama
Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011/2017
Tate
Presented by the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro 2015, accessioned 2019
© YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama
Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965, in Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965
Stuffed cotton, board, and mirrors
Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts; Victoria Miro; David Zwirner © YAYOI KUSAMA
© Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002. Mirrors, plexiglass, lights, and water, 111 × 144 1/2 × 144 1/2 in. (281.9 × 367 × 367 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Postwar Committee and the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittenborn Miller 2003.322. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph by Jason Schmidt.
Yayoi Kusama. LOVE IS CALLING, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, tile, acrylic panel, rubber, blowers, lighting element, speakers, and sound. 174 1/2 × 340 5/8 × 239 3/8 inches. Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Acquired through the generosity of Barbara Lee/The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Hilary and Geoffrey Grove, Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, Barbara H. Lloyd, and an anonymous donor. Photo by Ernie Galan. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy David Zwirner and Ota Fine Arts
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- Carla Tozzi
- 05 April 2023
Among them, the project carried out with Louis Vuitton in early 2023. After their first collaboration in 2012, this project brought the artist back into the spotlight with a collection dedicated to her famous polka dots. The works of the great Priestess of Polka Dots, as she has been called, hide a complicated past. A troubled life of abuse and rigid impositions. Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto – a city located in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. She had a traumatic childhood due to the typical conservative family environment of a harsh and unsympathetic mother and an unfaithful father.
When she was ten years old, she started to be affected by psychological disorders including hallucinations and visions, which she gave vent to through drawings and creativity. In the late 1950s, she finally moved to New York where she began her artistic career, achieving great success. In 1975, Yayoi Kusama returned to Japan to spread her art in her home country as well. However, the success was not immediately as expected and, due to severe depression, she checked herself into a clinic, where she still lives today. Forgotten in the West countries for almost a decade, in the late 1980s and 1990s they rekindled their interest in her works, so much so that she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Today, museums all over the world host her works. This year, a series of exhibitions – including one in Italy – want to celebrate her profundity and sensitivity. An artist who was able to transform traumatic events into vital energy in her art.
Immagine di apertura: Visitor experiencing Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe (2018), part of the 2022 exhibition One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo by Matailong Du. Wood and glass mirrored room with paper lanterns, 119 5/8 x 245 1/8 x 245 1/8 in. (304 x 622.4 x 622.4 cm). Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Purchased jointly by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2020), and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, with funds from the George B. and Jenny R. Mathews Fund, by exchange.
At the 1966 Art Biennale, Yayoi Kusama participated unofficially by presenting her work Narcissus Garden: 1,500 mirrored spheres that visitors could purchase for two dollars each. Near the installation is the sign “Your Narcissism for Sale,” recalling the feeling given by the mirror of an expanding world, where viewers can lose themselves by recognizing the narcissism of the desire to see themselves reflected within the work. Until May 14, 2023, Narcissus Garden will fill the space of the Aronson Fine Arts Center at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has been collecting Yayoi Kusama’s works since 1996. Until July 16, 2023, the exhibition One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection showcases works by the Japanese artist that belong to the museum’s permanent collection. These works include her Infinity Mirror Rooms, such as the 1965 Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) – the first of the artist’s immersive installations to transform the repetition of recurring visual elements in her work into a participatory experience.
Until May 13, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong hosts the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now – the largest retrospective on Yayoi Kusama in Asia outside Japan. The exhibition tells the artist’s life by foregrounding the research and deep questions that have guided her creative activity. More than 200 works including drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations to tell her career. In addition, new ones such as Death of Nerves (2022), Dots Obsession—Aspiring to Heaven’s Love (2022) and Pumpkin (2022).
One of the most anticipated exhibitions this spring in New York City galleries among the streets of Chelsea, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers at David Zwirner Gallery will display new paintings and sculptures on the leitmotifs of pumpkins and flowers, and a new Infinity Mirror Room. On the gallery’s website, a huge countdown marks the days until the opening of the exhibition. Given the enthusiastic reaction to the previous 2019 exhibition Every day I pray for love, it will undoubtedly reconfirm Yayoi Kusama’s success.
In Manchester, summer 2023 will be dedicated to Yayoi Kusama’s work. The Factory International celebrates thirty years of Japanese artist’s inflatable artworks, brought together for the first time in a single exhibition. The exhibition Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and The Balloons presents itself as a true journey into Kusama’s psychedelic creations. At the center of the immersive project offered to visitors there is the play with dimensions and materials.
Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011/2017
Tate
Presented by the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro 2015, accessioned 2019
© YAYOI KUSAMA
In 2021, London’s Tate Modern presented in the spaces of the George Economou Gallery the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms, in which one of the Japanese artist’s largest installations – Filled with the Brilliance of Life (2011-2017), made for the 2012 retrospective – will be open to the public. Along with this work, there will be Chandelier of Grief (2016-2018) as well – a room that creates the illusion of a boundless universe made of rotating crystal chandeliers. The exhibition will be open until April 2024.
Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965, in Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965
Stuffed cotton, board, and mirrors
Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts; Victoria Miro; David Zwirner © YAYOI KUSAMA
The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo presents an exhibition that focuses on the psychedelic aspects of the Japanese artist’s work, showcasing variations of her creations from different periods. The first of her hexagonal mirrored rooms presented in New York in the mid-1960s will be on display. Many drawings from Kusama’s early years will be on display as well – free representations of images and hallucinations. An exhibition meant to tell and let the audience experience “self-obliteration” – a key theme in Kusama’s work.
For the first time in Italy, a famous Infinity Mirror Room by Yayoi Kusama – Fireflies on the Water (2002) – is coming to Bergamo. The artwork comes from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. On the occasion of the celebration of Bergamo and Brescia as the 2023 Italian Capitals of Culture, Palazzo della Ragione will host this exhibition entitled Infinito Presente and curated by Stefano Raimondi. An unmissable opportunity to see one of Kusama’s most evocative works. On display from November 19, 2023 to January 24, 2024.
Love is Calling is among the largest and most kaleidoscopic Infinity Mirror Rooms by Yayoi Kusama. On display at the PAMM Perez Art Museum in Miami until February 2024, this work stands at the apex of her artistic career and perfectly represents the breadth of her visual and creative vocabulary, from polka dots, to bright colors, to the presence of mirrors that create spatial illusion. Upon entering the space, visitors will hear Kusama’s voice in the reading of a love poem in Japanese written by the artist and translated into English as Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears.