Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room — Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe, mirrored glass, wood, LED lighting system, metal, and acrylic panel, 2019 (photo courtesy David Zwirner)
David Zwirner
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online slideshow & video
What? You’re not on line yet? This is the last week to see Yayoi Kusama’s latest show at David Zwirner, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” another fabulous immersive presentation by the Japanese artist who turned ninety this year. All the furor is specifically for the new Infinity Mirrored Room — Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe, a spectacular closed-in space of mirrors, hanging balls, and changing colored lights that create a beautiful, endless world. But you’ll have to wait upwards of two and a half hours and more to spend thirty seconds in the room, most of which you will spend snapping photos and video instead of experiencing its bountiful wonder. However, there’s much more to “Every Day I Pray for Love,” and you don’t have to line up outside in the freezing cold to see it.
Yayoi Kusama’s Clouds slither toward “My Eternal Soul” paintings at David Zwirner (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In the main, large gallery, forty-two of Kusama’s “My Eternal Soul” paintings are arranged in three rows, exciting, colorful canvases that feature her trademark faces, circles, dots, eyes, embryos, and abstract geometric shapes and patterns, boasting such positive names as The Beauty of Millions of Love Seekers Flying Infinitely to the Universe, Shapes Full of Love That Have Always Shone in My Heart, Road to Eternal Love and Hope, The Limit of the Endless Beauty That Colours Spoke of Is Infinite, Such a Beautiful Love and Life Found by Us, and Challenge to New Art by I Who Thought the Splendor of the Universe Cannot Be More. On the floor of the room are several conglomerations of Kusama’s stainless-steel with patina and wax Clouds, which resemble dripped mercury taken solid form. Like the spheres in her Narcissus Garden, which people lined up to see in the Rockaways in the summer of 2018, you can walk among them and follow the changing reflections caused by the light from above.
Yayoi Kusama’s cast aluminum “Souls of Women That Continue Forever” hang over garden of soft sculptures as part of “Every Day I Pray for Love” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
At the base of the stairwell is the black-and-white fiberglass-reinforced plastic and stainless-steel Pumpkin, which you can look into, as its insides have already been scooped out. The upstairs gallery contains a childlike garden of sewn and stuffed soft sculptures with spiky elements and playful faces (for example, I Will Love with All My Heart and The Greatness of This Figure Talking Through Humankind and the Universe); “Souls of Women That Continue Forever,” a wall of cast aluminum shapes with women’s profiles repeated over and over in different colors; and two more acrylic paintings, including one whose title captures Kusama’s ethos: There Is No One Who Is Unmoved by How Amazing It Is to Be Able to See the Beauty of Creation Everyday in This World and Universe We Live In. And finally, be sure to go behind the black curtain to check out the awe-inspiring Ladder to Heaven, twelve LED-lit rungs with round mirrors above and below that make it seem like the ladder is going both deep underground as well as into the heavens as the color shifts like a James Turrell installation.
So don’t get too caught up waiting in line for the infinity room and risk not seeing the rest of this wonderful show, by perhaps the most popular, happy-making, and critically acclaimed living artist in the world. (And, yes, Instagram-friendly as well.) Meanwhile, Kusama — who still works every day, going from the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she has lived voluntarily since 1977, to her nearby studio — is most likely busy preparing her next batch of paintings, sculptures, and, just maybe, another infinity room that people are already dreaming of lining up for. As she writes on one of the walls of the gallery: “My entire life has been painted in these paintings. / Every day, any day. / I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love / for the universe. / Oh my dearest art. / With the challenge of creating / new art, I work as if dying / these works are my everything.”