For art lovers in New York, if you missed Yayoi Kusama’s amazing showing last year at the Whitney Museum (covered), you need to get over to David Zwirner. I Who Have Arrived In Heaven spans all three locations of the gallery in Chealsea (519, 525 and 533 West 19th Street) and features 27 new large-scale paintings, a video installation, as well as not one but two of the Japanese artist’s famed mirrored infinity rooms.
The first infinity room we spent some time in entitled Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (seen above) encompasses a cube-shaped, mirror-paneled room that features a shallow reflecting pool as its floor. Hundreds of multicolored LED lights are suspended at varying heights from the ceiling. Each light flickers on and off in a strobe-like effect, producing an intense illumination of the space and a repetitive pattern of reflections that suggest endlessness and ultimately invoke concepts of life and death. Hundreds of people patiently queued up to gain access to view this room. Once you get into the gallery, participants are instructed to wait single file and line the walls in a minimal white room. Perhaps this was to remind us that we’re in purgatory while awaiting what’s behind the door. Once inside you get approximately one minute to take in Kusama’s version of a life after death experience.
Take a look at more photos below as well as a some footage from the exhibition.
Discuss Yayoi Kusama here.
