Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 287.7 × 415.3 × 415.3 cm. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama
Experience infinity: From her immersive infinity rooms to mesmerizing paintings and playful sculptures, Yayoi Kusama welcomes you to participate in her extraordinary and innovative explorations of time and space.
Infinity may be a difficult concept to grasp, but it is easy to contemplate when you step inside one of artist Yayoi Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms in the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. Rich with key works from the contemporary Japanese artist’s significant 65-year career, this major exhibition also shows the evolution of her immersive, multi-reflective installations, in which she invites you to share in her unique vision.
Immerse yourself in six of these kaleidoscopic environments where you will be endlessly reflected within fantastic landscapes. You’ll also see Kusama’s mesmerizing and intimate drawings, her early Infinity Net paintings in which nets organically expand along the surface of a canvas like cell formations, and her surreal sculptural objects. These key works join more than 90 works on view, including large and vibrant paintings, sculptures, works on paper, as well as rare archival materials.
The 88-year-old artist continues to work at a brisk pace in her Tokyo studio. The exhibition features the North American debut of numerous new works. Her most recent painting series, My Eternal Soul (2009–present), may be the greatest surprise. Exuberant in colour and paired with sculptures that bear titles such as My Adolescence in Bloom, they mark a striking progression in the use of Kusama’s signature symbol of the polka dot. Also on view in North America for the first time is the recently realized Infinity Mirror Room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016 , a field of yellow, dotted pumpkins spreading into infinity.
In addition to the paintings, sculptures, drawings and environments, viewers will encounter posters, letters, cards, and invitations that relate to Kusama’s early exhibitions and events—including her first solo show, which took place in Seattle—a slideshow of Kusama’s performances as well as an interview with the artist filmed on the occasion of this exhibition.
The AGO is grateful for support from
Lead Sponsor
Supporting Sponsors
Generous Supporters
With assistance from
Government Partner
Promotional Partner
Supported by
Organizing Partner
Yayoi Kusama with recent works in Tokyo, 2016. Courtesy of the artist © Yayoi Kusama, Photo by Tomoaki Makino
Guided by her unique vision and unparalleled creativity, critically acclaimed artist Yayoi Kusama has been breaking new ground for more than six decades. In 1993, she became the first woman to have a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale’s Japanese Pavilion, and in 2016, Time magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people.
Born in 1929, Kusama grew up near her family’s plant nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. At nineteen, following World War II, she went to Kyoto to study the traditional Japanese style of painting known as Nihonga. During this time, she began experimenting with abstraction, but it was not until she arrived in the United States, in 1957, that her career took off. Living in New York from 1958 to 1973, Kusama moved in avant-garde circles with such figures as Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow while honing her signature dot and net motifs, developing soft sculpture, creating installation-based works, and staging Happenings (performance-based events). She first used the mirror as a multi-reflective device in Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965, transforming the intense repetition that marked some of her earlier works into an immersive experience. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 but has continued to develop her mirrored installations, and over the years, she has attained cult status, not only as an artist, but as a novelist.
Yayoi Kusama, Searching for Love, 2013. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore; Victoria Miro, London © Yayoi Kusama.
“...producing the unique art that came from within myself was the most important thing I could do to build my life as an artist.”
Kusama’s paintings embody the motifs echoed often throughout her work, giving evidence to the singular vision that has driven her over the course of her long career. Colours and patterns pulsate within the bordered spaces of her canvases. She was determined to incite experiences of immersion and boundlessness even in two dimensions.
“I thought of Seattle as only the first step in my reckless journey.”
Kusama’s works on paper first garnered attention in the United States in 1957, when she was the subject of a solo exhibition at Zoë Dusanne Gallery in Seattle. These early drawings are intimate, organic microcosms that the artist later expanded on in her Infinity Mirror Rooms.
Yayoi Kusama, Flower, 1975. Collage with pastel, ink, fabric on paper. 39.8 x 54.3 cm Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; David Zwirner, New York. © Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama, Life (Repetitive Vision), 1998. Installation view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017 © Yayoi Kusama. Photo by Cathy Carver
“I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration’.”
Kusama began making the Accumulations or soft sculptures in the early 1960s. They serve as important precursors to her Infinity Mirror Rooms. These works point to a crucial development that eventually transformed her process-based production from physical repetition to photographic reproduction to instantaneous reflection.
Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden, installation view at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden 2016 ©YAYOI KUSAMA, courtesy YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.
Don’t miss Kusama’s supplementary installation Narcissus Garden, featuring 1,300 stainless-steel mirror balls spread throughout our Signy-Eaton Gallery.
Created in 1966, the first incarnation of Narcissus Garden appeared in the gardens outside of that year’s Venice Biennale. As one of her first pieces of performance art, Kusama planted a sign reading “Your Narcissism for Sale” and sold each mirror ball to visitors for two dollars. On view from February 24 to April 29, 2018. Free with admission.
Yayoi Kusama (born 1929, Matsumoto, Japan), Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, 1967 16mm film transferred to DVD (colour, sound, 22 mins. 30 secs.). Cinematography by Jud Yalkut. Collection of the artist.
Kusama made this 16mm film with American experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut (1938–2013). In the late 1960s, America was undergoing a massive cultural shift, with the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests leading to the rise of hippie culture. Kusama embraced the radical peace-and-love sensibilities of the hippies and was inspired to create a series of similarly themed performance works, or Happenings. The film begins in rural upstate New York, with Kusama as its star, and features footage from Happenings in which she paints models with polka dots. It was so popular in art-house film circles that Kusama organized regular screenings and set up a company to sell prints from the film by mail order.
Companion publication to the AGO 2018 exhibition. World-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has worked in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation. Kusama's iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, which originated with Phalli's Field in 1965, situate viewers in kaleidoscopic spaces filled with multicolored lights or whimsical forms. These mirror-lined installations reflect endlessly, distorting rooms to project the illusion of infinite space. Over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities within the various contexts they have inhabited, from Kusama's self-obliteration in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize the body of work amidst the resurgence of experiential practices within the global landscape of contemporary art. Generously illustrated, this publication invites readers to examine the series impact over the course of the artist's career. Accompanying essays, an interview with the artist, and a scholarly chronology round out the book.
