The highly anticipated, most instagramed exhibition of the year, ‘Yayoi Kasuma– The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe’ has touched down in London this winter. With the free ticketed exhibition selling out within a day for a 3 month period, we were lucky enough to get our hands on some tickets and see some of her finest work.
Own images
The highlight of the show was the infinity mirrored room “my heart is dancing to the universe”. The mirrored room is full of giant paper lanterns covered in polka dot patterns suspended from the ceiling. Conveying the illusion of being unmoored in endless space, this large-scale work, the latest example of Kusama’sfamed immersive environments, offers a sense of infinity through the interplay of the rhythmic patterns of colourfulspots covering the black spherical lamps and the surrounding mirrors.
Own images
Paintings from the artist’s celebrated, ongoing My Eternal Soul series are 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.
Own images
About Yayoi Kasuma
For almost seventy years Yayoi Kusama has developed a practice, which, though it shares affiliations with movements such as Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop Art, resists any singular classification. Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, she studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s, and by the mid-1960s had become well known in the avant-garde world for her provocative happenings and exhibitions.
Since this time, Kusama’s extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature, fashion (most notably in her 2012 collaboration with Louis Vuitton) and product design.
Image: avenuemontaigneguide.com
Vuitton and Kasuma 2012 collection, Vogue.co.uk
In 2020 Kusamawill create her first permanent UK installation for the new Crossrailstation at Liverpool Street. Titled Infinite Accumulation, the site-specific work develops her instantly recognisablemotif – the polka dot – into a series of flowing, mirrored steel sculptures, each up to 12 metreswide and 10 metrestall. Below is a digitally rendered image of the installation:
https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/louis-vuitton-unveils-yayoi-kusama-collection
https://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/528/
The Print Affair 