Tickets for The Broad’s highly anticipated first visiting special exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, will go on sale at noon PT on Friday, September 1, the museum announced. The exhibition—opening at The Broad on October 21 and on view through January 1, 2018—is the first institutional survey to explore the celebrated Japanese artist’s immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, and The Broad will be the only museum in California to host the exhibition as it continues its six-venue North American tour.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will provide visitors with the unique opportunity to experience six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms—the artist’s most iconic kaleidoscopic environments—alongside large-scale installations and key paintings, sculptures and works on paper.
Since opening in September 2015, The Broad has featured Kusama’s installation Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013, from the Broad collection. One of the most popular artworks on view at The Broad, the work will be accessible to free general admission ticketholders until September 30, 2017, when it will transition to be included in the special exhibition through January 1, 2018. Following the special exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the artwork will once again be accessible with a free, timed, same-day reservation.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Curated by Mika Yoshitake, curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the exhibition includes the artist’s milestone installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (Floor Show), 1965/2016, a dense and dizzying field of hundreds of red-spotted phallic tubers in a room lined with mirrors.
The exhibition will also include Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever, 1966/1994, a hexagonal chamber into which viewers will be able to peer from the outside, seeing colored flashing lights that reflect endlessly from ceiling to floor. The work is a re-creation of Kusama’s legendary 1966 mirror room Kusama’s Peep Show or Endless Love Show (no longer extant); the mirror panels were used to stage group performances in her studio in the late 1960s.
Kusama’s signature bold polka dots will be featured in Dots Obsession—Love Transformed into Dots, 2007, a domed mirror room surrounded by inflatables suspended from the ceiling. More recent spectacular LED environments, filled with lanterns or crystalline balls that seem to extend into infinite space, will be represented by Infinity Mirrored Room—Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009, and The Broad’s Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.
A selection of more than 60 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and archival materials will also be on view, showcasing several of Kusama’s lesser-known collages, made after her return to Japan in 1973. These works trace the artist’s trajectory from her early surrealist works on paper, Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation assemblages to recent paintings and soft sculptures, highlighting recurring themes of nature and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, unity and isolation, obsession and detachment, and life and death.
The exhibition will conclude with Kusama’s iconic participatory installation The Obliteration Room, 2002-present, an all-white replica of a traditional domestic setting. Upon entering, visitors will be invited to cover every surface of the furnished gallery with multicolored polka dot stickers, gradually engulfing the entire space in pulsating color.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog that takes an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to her work and includes a catalogue raisonné of Kusama’s infinity rooms, along with an illustrated chronology and artist biography with newly published archival material. The contributing authors introduce new research that sheds light on this pioneering contemporary artist, including essays by Yoshitake, Gloria Sutton and Alexander Dumbadze and an interview with Kusama conducted by Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano, in 1929, and works at her studio in Tokyo. She studied traditional Nihonga (Japanese-style) painting in Kyoto and moved to New York City in 1958. There, she was active in avant-garde circles during the formative years of Pop art and Minimalism, exhibiting her work alongside such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow—figures who have cited Kusama as influential to the development of assemblage, environmental art and performative practices.
Kusama exhibited widely in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in the mid-1960s, participating in exhibitions with artists associated with Nul, Zero and the New Tendency in Europe, where she began developing her interest in the optics and interactive elements of mirrors, electric lights, sound and kinetics.
Kusama’s fame grew in the late 1960s through her radical antiwar happenings, which espoused nudity and polka dots in the streets of New York. Because of ongoing struggles with her health, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, where she has since resided. In recent years, Kusama has achieved celebrity status as well as tremendous critical respect.
For more information on #InfiniteKusama and The Broad’s presentation of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, visit The Broad.
