Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016. Wood, mirror, plastic, black glass, LED. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London. © Yayoi Kusama.
Art Instagrammers rejoice: your feeds are about to get a boost.
The Art Gallery of Ontario announced this morning that 87-year-old Japanese artist (and social-media darling) Yayoi Kusama’s institutional survey exhibition will make a Canadian stop at the gallery in 2018.
Touted as the “most significant North American tour” of Kusama’s work in some two decades, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and will also be travelling to the Seattle Art Museum, the Broad in Los Angeles and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Some six versions of Kusama’s infinity rooms, including an iteration filled with her famed, dotted pumpkins, will be included in the exhibition, which will also show her large-scale paintings.
It’s an approach that the New York Times suggests is “in keeping with the artist’s ‘more is more’ or ‘more is necessary’ ethos: the hyperaccumulation of objects and relentless repetition of images associated with her history of hallucinations and psychological trauma.”
And it will undoubtedly be a boon for the AGO’s attendance: according to a survey by the Art Newspaper, Kusama’s retrospective “Infinite Obsession,” which began at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, had the highest attendance rates of any artist in 2014, when it was visited by more than two million people in South and Central America.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama moved to New York City in the late 1950s. In New York, she hosted “happenings” at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and began her preoccupation with dots. In the early 1970s she moved into a psychiatric facility in Japan, where she chooses to reside today. She is represented by David Zwirner in New York.
