Yayoi Kusama - I Who Have Arrived In Heaven

David Zwirner presents I Who Have Arrived In Heaven,  the gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Yayoi Kusama. Spanning the  gallery’s three consecutive locations on West 19th Street in New  York, the exhibition features twenty-seven new large-scale paintings  alongside a recent video installation and two mirrored infinity rooms,  one of which is made especially for this presentation.

Yayoi Kusama’s work has transcended two of the most important  art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop  art and minimalism. Her extraordinary and highly influential career  spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor  sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and  interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at  once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.

The exhibition’s title, I Who Have Arrived In Heaven, reflects the  artist’s long-standing interest in cosmic realms and resonates with the autobiographical element that runs through her oeuvre. The recent and new works on view at the gallery continue her innovative exploration of form, content, and space, while at the same time presenting a link to her artistic production from the past six decades.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is Kusama’s newest mirrored infinity room. Shown here for the first time, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away encompasses a cube-shaped, mirror-paneled room that features a shallow reflecting pool as its floor. Hundreds of multicolored LED lights are suspended at varying heights from the ceiling. They flicker on and off in a strobe-like effect, producing an intense illumination of the space and a repetitive pattern of reflections that suggest endlessness and ultimately invoke concepts of life and death.

Another mirrored infinity room, Love Is Calling, stands as one of Kusama’s most immersive, kaleidoscopic environments to date. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. A sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. The work was shown earlier this year in Tokyo as part of a group exhibition commemorating the Mori Art Museum’s 10th anniversary. The gallery’s presentation marks its United States debut.

 

 

Info and images David Zwirner Gallery

Yayoi Kusama - I Who Have Arrived In Heaven