Victoria Miro in London is currently hosting a new exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Yayoi Kusama. Spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden, the exhibition features new paintings, pumpkin sculptures, and immersive room experiences, all made especially for this showing. This is the artist’s most extensive exhibition at the gallery to date, and it is the first time mirror rooms have gone on view in London since Kusama’s major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012.
Her iconic dots patterns, pumpkins and mirror rooms are a lifelong exploration of the self’s relationship to the infinite cosmos. Her installations place the viewer within a universe of varying proliferating reflections. New paintings displayed alongside these immersive rooms continue an enduring preoccupation with multiplying polka dots and dense scalloped ‘infinity net’ patterns – Kusama’s obsessive repetition of these forms on canvas, which she has described as a form of active self-obliteration are responses to hallucinations she first experienced in childhood. The pumpkin, another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also present in the form of new mirror polished sculptures.
