Throughout her 70-year career, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has never hesitated to confront viewers with the beguiling duality of existence, at once chaotically complex and beautifully simple. Her latest shows are no exception.
Yayoi Kusama in her studio. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
New York City's David Zwirner Gallery is running two concurrent exhibitions of Kusama's recent work. The Upper East Side space features four new Infinity Nets paintings — abstract works of minutely painted nets across monochrome backgrounds.
But its the show at the Chelsea locations — comprising two galleries — that really dazzles. Festival of Life features a dizzying grid of vibrant, whimsical paintings, fantastically scaled, boldly colored stainless steel sculptures, and mind-bending rooms of bright red polka-dots and mirrors.
Welcome to Kusama's fun house.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room — Let's Survive Forever, 2017. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life, David Zwirner, New York, 2017. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
The feminist pop-artist's work is as eclectic as modern art itself. The 88-year-old is known for her paintings, drawings, sculpture, performance, and installation art that uses a variety of mediums, patterns, and colors — lots and lots of colors.
Let's begin with the paintings in the Chelsea locations. One gallery room's expansive four walls are carpeted with 66 paintings from Kusama's My Eternal Soul series — ongoing since 2000. At the center are her giant, exaggerated flowers screaming with wild patterns and hues.
From afar, the color grid is an enchanting affront to the senses — a walk-in Magic Eye poster so packed with pattern and movement as to discourage focus. And yet, each fastidiously detailed painting begs the viewer to come closer, to examine the bizarre organic forms — flowers, microorganisms, anthropomorphic beings — that make up the bewildering whole. Step back once again and the canvases morph back into its optical illusion, teeming with life.
Yayoi Kusama, Dwelling of Love, 2016. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
Yayoi Kusama, Human Beauty of Smiles, 2015. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
This is the undulating magnetism of Kusama's work — the mischievous exploration of life's juxtapositions in one space. In her paintings, the artist plays with the puzzle-like duality of the part versus the whole, the micro and the macro. Meanwhile, her stainless steel sculptures combine the themes of the organic with the artificial.
And then there are Kusama's mirrored rooms.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room — Let's Survive Forever, 2017. Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life, David Zwirner, New York, 2017. | (Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
Kusama has long been infatuated with the theme of infinity, replicating a simple concept (reflection) or shape (red dots) until the lines between beginning and end, limitless and containment, are blurred.
The David Zwirner exhibition debuts two new Infinity Mirror Rooms in the Chelsea locations. In one space viewers are plunged in medias res, flanked on all sides by mirrored walls and suspended mirrored spheres. Viewers' reflections become a dizzying motif as they multiply interminably, yet contrastingly.
The spheres appear to reflect inward, containing increasingly miniscule echoes of the viewers viewing themselves, while the mirrored walls reflect outward, creating an ever-expanding room of selves.
In the other space — colloquially known as the "selfie station" — viewers remain corporeally absent from the space, peering only through a peephole into an infinitely reflective void of flickering lights.
That both spaces have already been heavily photographed and Instagrammed (as most Kusama shows are) — visitors have a 30-second time limit to take selfies — allows the artist's infinity theme to be pushed even further.
Yayoi Kusama, Longing For Eternity, 2017. Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life, David Zwirner, New York, 2017. | (Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
Yayoi Kusama, Longing For Eternity, 2017. Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life, David Zwirner, New York, 2017. | (Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
A third space in the Chelsea gallery offers infinity room viewers an oddly reassuring break from the self. The sculptural installation With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever is a white room blanketed with red polka dots.
Everything is covered — from the walls to the floors to the sculptures in the center of the room. Here, Kusama's infinity motif nearly obscures form altogether.
Yayoi Kusama, With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever, 2011. Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life, David Zwirner, New York, 2017. (Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)
Walking through the infinity rooms, I was reminded of a question posed by the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal: "What is man in the infinite?" Pascal was also interested in duality, and wrote extensively about the two sides of infinity: the infinitely large — that which expands outward forever, as in outer space; and the infinitely small — that which becomes increasingly complex as it turns inward (think of how living organisms house innumerable cells).
Pascal writes that humans flicker between being subsumed in unconscious existence and observing existence consciously from the outside; in other words, the states of being and observing are separate, opposed.
Kusama, on the other hand, juxtaposes these two states of infinity — the outward and the inward — to demonstrate how they merge: as one must be to observe, observation is simply a result of being. It is a creative, dynamic, ever-evolving process.
And such is the immersive experience of a Kusama show. These electric, mind-bending pieces seem to gleefully answer Pascal's question: Infinity and its duality exist within human experience.
**Yayoi Kusama's Festival of Life (at 525 & 533 West 19th St.) and Infinity Nets (at 34 East 69th St.) are on view at the David Zwirner galleries in New York City from Nov. 2 until Dec. 16, 2017. Read more about the exhibitions at DavidZwirner.com.**
The week's best photojournalism
In this week's most striking images, a demonstrator throws a stone in India, skiers gather in Austria, and more
The Manafort sign guy's greatest hits
Throughout the Manafort trial, there was one constant: A mysterious protester, hovering just behind Manafort or his legal team, holding up a white sign with a brief, pungent message. Here are eight of his most memorable.
