Yayoi Kusama in her infinity mirror room The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away at the David Zwirner gallery in New York in 2013. Australia’s NGV will open an exhibition of the artist’s work in December.Yayoi Kusama in her infinity mirror room The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away at the David Zwirner gallery in New York in 2013. Australia’s NGV will open an exhibition of the artist’s work in December.
The NGV isn’t stating definitively how many infinity rooms Melbourne will get yet, but the senior NGV curators Wayne Crothers and Miranda Wallace have suggested it will be more than six. The following year she invited herself to the Venice Biennale and set up what she described as her “kinetic carpet” outside the host country’s pavilion. Her Narcissus Garden, consisting of hundreds of mirrored spheres, was sold off by the artist one ball at a time for US$2 each until biennale authorities put a stop to it.
The nonagenarian artist will not be attending the opening of her Australian retrospective. Kusama has rarely travelled outside Japan since she voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric facility outside Tokyo in the 1970s. She travels the short distance to her studio each day where she continues her art practice, which has been focused on painting since the early 2000s.