Yayoi Kusama Is Back With—You Guessed It—a New Infinity Room, and It’s Going to Be Epic
Don’t be surprised if you spot a line snaking around the block
in Chelsea next month, because Yayoi Kusama is staging another show
at David Zwirner, and it’s bound to be a blockbuster.
The Japanese artist has become a worldwide sensation on the
strength of her signature polka dots and Infinity Mirror
Rooms, Instagram-friendly works that inspire insane levels of
FOMO.
At Kusama’s last show with the
gallery, in 2017, 75,000 visitors showed
up, a number more in line with museum exhibitions than gallery
shows. Guests waited in lines for up to six hours for a chance to
spend just 60 seconds inside INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM: LET’S
SURVIVE FOREVER, an echo chamber of mirrored
surfaces in which—no joke—Kusama installed an infinity
room inside an infinity room, with reflective steel orbs strewn
about the space.
Now, David Zwirner has shared details about the upcoming
exhibition, first announced in
June. All the work has been made over the past two years,
including new paintings from Kusama’s “My Eternal Soul” series of
surreal, colorful, square-shaped canvases, according
to ARTnews.
The steel orbs will also be back, in an installation reminiscent
of Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, first staged at
the Venice Biennale back in 1966. Kusama revisited the piece at
the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, in
2016, and in 2018 at Fort Tilden in
Queens through a project with MoMA PS1. A display of
the shiny balls was also among the highlights of
this year’s Frieze New York, at the booth of London’s Victoria Miro
Gallery.
“Rockaway!” a site-specific installation
of Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama. Artwork © Yayoi
Kusama, courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai;
Victoria Miro, London/Venice; and David Zwirner, New York. Photo by
Pablo Enriquez, courtesy MoMA PS1.
This time around, Kusama has created a new take on the historic
piece by creating balls in varying sizes.
As always, the top attraction will certainly be the Infinity
Room, a new 13-and-a-half foot space filled with LED
lights. The piece, titled INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM –
DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE, will be more
minimal than previous Infinity Rooms, and “very different from
anything you’ve seen before,” Hanna Schouwink, a senior partner at
Zwirner, told ARTnews.
Yayoi Kusama, INFINITY MIRRORED
ROOM: LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER (2017) at David Zwirner, New York.
Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
For the first time, the gallery will be open on Mondays for the
run of the show, but only for school groups with appointments,
offering local children the chance to experience Kusama’s
interactive work. Once again, there will be a time limit
inside the immersive installation, and long lines are expected for
the duration of the show. (But without tickets, at least there
won’t be scalpers.)
“Every time Kusama has a show, whether it’s in a museum or a
gallery, attendance grows,” Schouwink said. “The interest in her
work continues to grow. People always think, ‘If I come Tuesday,
there won’t be lines.’ For sure, there will always be lines.”
“Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I
Pray for Love” will be on view at David Zwirner, 537 West 20th
Street, New York, New York, November 9–December 14,
2020.
The post Yayoi Kusama Is Back With—You Guessed It—a New
Infinity Room, and It’s Going to Be Epic appeared first on
artnet News.
Further reading
Leave a comment