One year of ehibition. From 14 June 2021 to 12 June 2022 in London, Tate Modern presents two immersive mirror room installations by Yayoi Kusama. A fil rouge, among her Art Interpretations, unites United Kingdom with Germany in which a solo is running.
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms” consists in two major installations alongside fascinating early documentation of Kusama’s experimental performances and events, as well as a brand-new sculptural work that continues the theme of endless replication. The exhibition features Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, one of Kusama’s largest installations to date and originally created for her 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern. In this immersive work, mirrored walls and a shallow pool of water endlessly multiply a constellation of tiny, suspended lights to create a feeling of infinite space. This is shown alongside Chandelier of Grief, another whole-room installation in which the viewer disappears into a seemingly boundless universe of rotating chandeliers.
Visitors are able to experience The Universe as Seen from the Stairway to Heaven 2021, Kusama’s brand new ‘peep in’ sculpture, which has been created especially for this exhibition. Deploying both mirrors and the colourful ‘dot’ motif, it recalls the iconic early work Kusama’s Peep Show or Endless Love Show 1966. The work demonstrates Kusama’s life-long obsession with concept of infinite repetition, exploiting the formal properties of mirrors to create the illusion of limitless space.
An accompanying display of film and photography – some on show for the very first time – provides historical context for the global phenomenon that Kusama’s mirror rooms have become today. Photographs by Eikoh Hosoe (born 1933) and the partnership Harry Shunk (1924-2006) and János Kender (1937-2009) explore how Kusama subverted the notion of the artist’s studio: Hosoe’s images show the studio as an almost reverent space that is central to Kusama’s unique artistic brand, while Shunk-Kender show Kusama traversing the studio’s physical boundaries, the mirrored environments becoming a backdrop for performance, painting, sculpture and fashion design. This theme of the expanded studio is continued in Walking Piece, a slide show made with photographs again taken by Hosoe who captured an early performance of Kusama navigating the desolate streets of New York, an act that highlights her outsider status and feelings of urban alienation.
The exhibition also includes recently rediscovered film footage by the British academic John Jones (1926-2010) of Kusama in her New York studio in the mid-1960s – a unique, moving image testimony that records the artist’s earliest sculptural works and confirms her simultaneously as a torch bearer for surrealism and an unparalleled artistic force in her own right.
Photo credits, here below:
Yayoi Kusama
The Universe as Seen from the Stairway to Heaven 2021
Courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys).
Yayoi Kusama
Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011/2017
Tate
Presented by the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro 2015, accessioned 2019 © YAYOI KUSAMA
Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys)
Yayoi Kusama
Chandelier of Grief 2016/2018
Tate
Presented by a private collector, New York 2019
© YAYOI KUSAMA
Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro
Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys).
Tate Modern
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms
14 June 2021 – 12 June 2022
(Members from 18 May 2021)
by Alain Chivilò via Tate
