Twenty-five of Yayoi Kusama’s “Every Day I Pray for Love” paintings are part of new show at David Zwirner in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
YAYOI KUSAMA: I SPEND EACH DAY EMBRACING FLOWERS
David Zwirner
519, 525, 533 West Nineteenth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through July 21, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.davidzwirner.com
online slide show
There are only two days left to see Yayoi Kusama’s latest exhibition of new works at David Zwirner, a three-part show entitled “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers.” Kusama is ninety-four and has been living voluntarily in the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo since 1977; every day she gets up and walks over to her studio across the street and works. There are long lines to get into the show on West Nineteenth St., but that is primarily for Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, a Mirror Infinity Room where groups of no more than five people can spend sixty seconds in a seemingly endless space of red, yellow, blue, and green disks; while it’s very cool, it’s not necessarily a must-see if you have to wait online for an hour or more to get inside.
There is less of a line, if any at all, to see the rest of the exhibit, a kind of organic follow-up to her wonderful “Cosmic Nature” display throughout the New York Botanical Garden in 2021. The title piece at Zwirner consists of thee large-scale, colorful, and hugely adorable stainless-steel flower sculptures, a celebration of the beauty of the natural world while also touching on the impermanence of life. In a back room, there are three dozen new acrylic and ink paintings, mostly from her “Every Day I Pray for Love” series, canvases that feature many of her favorite elements, from dots and circles to squiggly lines and abstract geometric shapes; twenty-five of the pieces hang together in a lovely display on one wall.
The highlight is Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, a trio of long, undulating, somewhat flattened black and yellow bronze pumpkin sculptures winding their way through their own room. They evoke Richard Serra’s freestanding sets of weatherproof steel plates, only here bright with color and charm; I dare you to try not to smile as you follow the paths in and around the works, which reflect the light and passersby. See if you can find the two areas where Kusama used a camera obscura, resulting in upside-down images
Kusama has also delivered a special message for the show, summing up her world view: “I’ve Sung the Mind of Kusama / Day by Day, / a Song from the Heart. / O Youth of Today, / Let Us Sing Together a Song from / the Heart of the Universe!”
(To receive a digital booklet of select poems from Kusama’s 2023 collection Every Day I Pray for Love, go here.)