From 3 October to 21 December 2018 in London, Victoria Miro presents a major exhibition of new work by Yayoi Kusama. This exhibition features new paintings, including works from the iconic ‘My Eternal Soul’ series, painted bronze pumpkin and flower sculptures, and a large-scale infinity room, and takes place across the Wharf Road galleries and waterside gardens.
Kusama’s unique and diverse body of work, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences. Her oeuvre continues to address the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, with the new works in this series as testament to an artist at the height of her powers as she approaches her 90th birthday. Her ongoing and highly celebrated series ‘My Eternal Soul’ once again evokes her joyful improvisation, fluidity, and instincts as an artist; they are abound with imageries of eyes, faces in profile, along with other indeterminate forms. This includes the dots for which Kusama is synonymous, offering impressions of worlds at once microscopic and macroscopic.
Kusama’s pumpkin form has been a recurring motif in her career since the late 1940s. Her family cultivated plant seeds in Matsumoto, additionally allowing her to be familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home. Writing about the significance of pumpkins in her 2011 book ‘Infinity Net: the Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama’, she states how “It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance.’ Works on display at Victoria Miro include new bronze pumpkins painted in vibrant hues of red, yellow and green. The black dots that adorn these pumpkins symbolise Kusama’s hallucinations that began in the early childhood that left her seeing repeated patterns that engulfed her field of vision.
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