Colourful large-scale flower sculptures, sixty-six paintings from the series "My Eternal Soul", a trademark polka-dotted environment, and two Infinity Mirror Rooms welcome the visitors who brave the queues at David Zwirner to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibitions on view across three gallery spaces in New York - "Festival of Life" (until December 16, 2017) at 525 and 533 West 19th Street in Chelsea, and "Infinity Nets" at the recently opened space on 34 East 69th Street on the Upper East Side.
The art world may have been well-acquainted with the works of Kusama since the late '80s when she gained widespread recognition (she represented Japan in 1993 at the 45th Venice Biennale). But the Japanese artist entered the global fashion and commercial realm thanks to Marc Jacobs who created a capsule collection at Louis Vuitton inspired by the artist in 2012, celebrated at the time by window installations featured artworks by Kusama, mini-dolls and a life-size wax figure of the artist, obviously lost in a sea of dots.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama studied painting at Kyoto's School of Art where she received a classical formation that clearly emerges from her early paintings in which she injected a certain degree of hallucination as well.
She had her first solo show in 1952 and, when she moved to New York City in the late 1950s, Kusama started experimenting with matter and with monochrome "Infinity Nets" (some of them are 10 metres long) characterised by exaggerated brushstrokes.
As the years passed, the artist introduced colour turning the "infinity nets" she would see in her hallucinations and daydreams into mesmerising patterns characterised by bright tones of yellow, red or fuchsia.
In 1961 Kusama started experimenting with sculpture, seriality, accumulations and assemblages, her practice gradually became more varied and complex as she produced performances, room-size presentations and sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures.
The "Festival of Life" exhibition represents a sort fo summary of Kusama's practice: the paintings from the series "My Eternal Soul", begun in the late 2000s, cover four walls of the gallery with their microscopic and macroscopic universes rendered in bright colours.
They invite visitors to explore their abstract forms and figurative elements and to consider the symbolisms behind them. Though the paintings are characterised by bright and bold colours, at times their titles hint at sad events or sombre moods.
A painting with three concentric abstract squares is entitled "Death Is Inevitable"; the disembodied eyes floating on a black background in "Tears of Despair" point at recurrent symbols (think about other Kusama's paintings such as "I want to live honestly like the eye in the picture" or "Eyes of Mine"), while pointing at Kusama's heart, burdened by sadness and pain. Joy returns, though, in other paintings such as "Girls at Spring" with female figures beaming surrounded by an abstract cosmos.
The new stainless steel sculptures covered in urethane paint introduce instead visitors to the three-dimensional world of the artist, while confusing their perceptions through the "organic Vs artificial dichotomy", as the sculptures represent pumpkins but the material they are made in and the colours and dot patterns that cover them do not belong to the natural world.
Kusama's oversized potted flowers in "With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever" (2011) and "Flowers That Bloom Now" (2017) are made in the same materials and play along the same dichotomic lines, while the two new Infinity Mirror Rooms complete the experience in a mesmerisingly multi-sensory way.
One room, with miniature light bulbs in changing colours creating a mesmerising hexagonal pattern, can be viewed through three peepholes; the other can be experienced from within and consists in Kusama's trademark mirrored room this time with stainless steel balls suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor, the objects creating a sense of infinity through the play of reflections and an all-enveloping viewing experience (expect the visitors to this exhibition posting thousands of pictures on the social media...).
The Infinity Net paintings on view at the gallery's uptown location continue instead the series Kusama started in New York in the 1950s and feature nets painted across monochrome backgrounds.
The last ten years have been remarkable for Yayoi Kusama: major art institutions all over the world dedicated her large-scale retrospectives; last year she was the first woman to receive the Order of Culture, the highest honor bestowed by the Japanese Imperial Family; a museum dedicated to the artist's work opened a month ago in Tokyo with the inaugural exhibition "Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art", while next year David Zwirner Books will publish a fully-illustrated volume about her work.
Yet, though nowadays we know her and her works much better thanks to all these events, since Kusama expresses herself through different media, it remains difficult to pigeonhole her. But maybe her painting "Shape of My Heart" somehow manages to describe her: black thick lines form abstract shapes on an orange pumpkin background on this canvas, her heart taking many forms and silhouettes, at times looking like swirling bacteria, forming concentric universes within universes, representing an infinite maelstrom of activity and creativity.
Comments