Yayoi Kusama: THE MOVING MOMENT WHEN I WENT TO THE … · Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and currently lives and w orks in Tokyo, where the Yayoi Kusama
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Yayoi Kusama: THE MOVING MOMENT WHEN I WENT TO THE UNIVERSE 3 October–21 December 2018
Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
Victoria Miro is delighted to announce a major exhibition of new work by Yayoi Kusama. Taking place across the
Wharf Road galleries and waterside garden, the exhibition will feature new paintings, including works from the iconic
My Eternal Soul series, painted bronze pumpkin and flower sculptures, and a large-scale Infinity Mirror Room.
Throughout her career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects
profoundly with global audiences. Continuing to address the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, the new works in this
exhibition are testament to an artist at the height of her powers as she approaches her 90th birthday. Paintings from the artist’s celebrated,
ongoing My Eternal Soul series will be on view at Gallery II, Wharf Road. Joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual, the My Eternal
Soul paintings abound with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots for which the
artist is synonymous, to offer impressions of worlds at once microscopic and macroscopic.
The pumpkin form has been a recurring motif in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating
plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home. Writing about the significance
of pumpkins in her 2011 book Infinity Net: the Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, the artist notes: ‘It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much
respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous
unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance.’ Works on display include new bronze pumpkin sculptures, painted in a vibrant
palette of red, yellow and green, their curvaceous forms adorned with tapering patterns of black dots that create a sophisticated geometry.
It was in early childhood that Kusama also began to experience the terrifying hallucinations that left her ‘dazzled and dumbfounded’ by
repeating patterns that engulfed her field of vision, a process she referred to as obliteration. The pumpkin sculptures integrate many key
aspects of Kusama’s practice: the repeating pattern of dots, connotations of growth and fertility and a palette of singular vibrancy.