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Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors Exhibit at The Broad
10/21/2017 - 1/1/2018
$25Event Navigation
The Broad’s first visiting special exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors—the first institutional survey to explore the celebrated Japanese artist’s immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms—will embark on the most significant North American tour of her work in nearly two decades, and The Broad will be the only California museum to host the exhibition. (October 21, 2017–January 1, 2018).
Since opening in September 2015, The Broad has featured Kusama’s installation Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013, from the Broad collection. One of the most popular artworks on view at The Broad, the installation is a mirror-lined chamber populated with a dazzling and seemingly vast array of LED lights creating a disorienting sense of limitless space. The work will be accessible to free general admission ticketholders through September 30, 2017, when it will temporarily transition to be included in the special exhibition through early January 2018. After the close of the special exhibition, the Infinity Mirrored Room will once again be accessible to free general admission ticketholders.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will provide visitors with the unique opportunity to experience six of Kusama’s infinity rooms—the artist’s most iconic kaleidoscopic environments—alongside large-scale installations and key paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the early 1950s to the present, which contextualize the foundational role the concept of infinity has played in the artist’s work over many decades and through diverse media. The exhibition also marks the North American debut of numerous new works by the 88-year-old artist, who is still actively creating in her Tokyo studio. These include large-scale, vibrantly colored paintings and the recently realized infinity room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016, featuring dozens of her signature bright yellow, dotted pumpkins.
“Our Infinity Mirrored Room has become a cultural phenomenon and many of our visitors are extremely passionate about Kusama’s work,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad. “The timing is right for an exhibition that contextualizes the infinity rooms and brings Kusama’s contributions to 20th and 21st century art into deeper focus. We are thrilled to present this unprecedented special exhibition at The Broad next year that engages seven decades of work by a phenomenal artist.”
As a paid special exhibition at The Broad, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will include access to the rest of the museum. Tickets for the full run of the show will be released on September 1 at noon PT.
In 1961, Yayoi Kusama, then thirty-two years old, displayed a painting that was thirty-three feet long and almost ten feet high at Stephen Radich Gallery in New York. The painting, no longer extant, was one of the largest of the abstract expressionist era, a time in art known for expansive canvases and large-scale pursuits. Kusama’s work, however, was made exclusively with small marks, her gestures as tiny as the canvas was enormous: little arcs of white pigment applied with a brush accumulating by the thousands, giving the field a dense web of touches seemingly uncountable in their multitude. To stand in front of this work would have been to stand in a complete environment, to sense a vastness. Kusama has used this technique into the present. Her “Infinity Nets,” as these paintings came to be called, are performances in paint, obsessions in space, and literally other worlds made visible.
Kusama paints what she sees, as a still-life painter would paint a bowl of fruit. From an early age, she was has prone to hallucinations due to mental illness, vivid experiences of the world distorted and enhanced by colors and shapes. “These forms come not only from the artist’s observation of nature, but from an inner mindscape,” critic Bob Nickas writes, “the paintings can be seen as representations of space, as well as images of what cannot easily be represented—infinity or hallucination.” Kusama’s work resides somewhere between representation and abstraction: for the artist, representation, and for everyone else, abstraction.
Throughout the 1960s and early 70s, Kusama’s paintings and performances mirrored an age where vision was constantly challenged and new vistas consistently sought. At various points, Kusama was espoused by artists across a variety of formats and theoretical concerns, including pop, minimalism, and surrealism. Perhaps more pointedly, her work appealed to New York’s turbulent political and social environment. Kusama staged multiple fully nude happenings across the city to protest the war in Vietnam, economic disparity and the excesses of Wall Street, and the hierarchy and gender inequality of museums. At the same time, her visions matched the transcendental aspirations of psychedelic drugs and mind-altering spiritual movements of hippie culture.
Ultimately, it was in installation where Kusama found a way to best express the impact of her interior mind on her external environment. “As I was painting, absorbed,” Kusama told Index magazine in 1998,” I realized that the new was spilling over the desk….I was painting on the floor. And then, one day, when I woke up, I found a red net covering a window….The entire room was covered with red net.” Kusama’s nets became inhabitable environments. Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013, is just such an inhabitable Kusama world. A room is completely covered with mirrors and dozens of LED lights hang from the ceiling. As the multitude of lights reflect, they accumulate and expand exponentially. This sense of infinity has been with Kusama from the beginning, always looking for clearer ways to express itself. Inside Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, Kusama’s world is the viewer’s world.
