From infinity to beyond: NGV unveils blockbuster Kusama exhibition

The gallery’s closest held secret – Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light installation – has finally been revealed. It is one of more than 200 pieces showing in the exhibition of the revered artist.

Yayoi Kusama is a world-premiere blockbuster exhibition celebrating the illustrious career of the iconic contemporary artist spanning her eight-decade practice. Art lover Anna Lynn finds herself immersed in light and mirrors in the Infinity Mirror Room. Picture: David Caird

The notion of infinity has been at the heart of Yayoi Kusama’s practice for eight decades –from her earliest spotted net paintings, to the endless polkadots and mirrored rooms that characterise her wildly popular sculptures and installations. But now aged 95, has the Japanese artist’s relationship with the idea of forever wavered? “Her mindset on most things has not changed much at all over the years,” said Hidenori Ota, Kusama’s longtime gallerist. “Kusama is Kusama. She stays the same.”

The artist is nothing if not a creature of habit. She famously has lived since 1973 in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital since voluntarily admitting herself. But it is the idea of infinity that has been the prevailing narrative of her oeuvre. The mirrors and endless polkadots she uses in her canvases and large-scale sculpture are at once a representation of her obsessions and a way of calming her mind, Mr Ota said.

The gallerist was at the National Gallery of Victoria on Friday with NGV director Tony Ellwood to open the St Kilda Rd gallery’s blockbuster summer show Yayoi Kusama, a major retrospective of work by the titular painter and sculptor.

Mr Ellwood yesterday unveiled the NGV’s closest held secret – Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, 2024. The installation, a reflective room bedotted with stainless steel balls that emanate coloured light through small holes in their shells, is on loan from Ota Fine Arts. Commissioned by the NGV and completed this year, the infinity room is one of more than 200 pieces, from paintings and sculpture to installations and works on paper, showing in the exhibition, which runs until April.

“The concept of ‘obliterating oneself into the infinite world’ and ‘endless interest in the infinite universe’, underlines this work,” Mr Ota said.

Mr Ellwood said the work was “the culmination of more than eight decades of constant artistic innovation, creating new ways to express Kusama’s unique perspective of the world around us”.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. (Photo by Steve Eichner/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)

Kusama was having a moment, Mr Ota said. The red-bobbed nonagenarian last year was crowned the world’s biggest selling contemporary artist, reaping $90 million in sales at auction houses around the world. Further, she arguably is the world’s most instagrammable artist – her wildly colourful shows in major cities around the world have seen lengthy queues form for entry.

Mr Ota said her fame was all the more remarkable because she no longer worked in the studio, and rather made art daily in a second room in her hospital quarters.

The NGV – which has yarnbombed trees around Melbourne in the artist’s signature polka dot motif – hopes the show will come close to, if not beat, its paid attendance record of 462,262 visitors. The figure was clocked for its 2017 show van Gogh and the Seasons.

Hidenori Ota at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Photo: Aaron Francis Photography

The sprawling new exhibition, which occupies the entire floor of the gallery, features the NGV’s latest large-scale Kusama acquisitions: Narcissus Garden, a work comprising 1400 reflective steel balls that the artist in 1966 dumped on the lawns of the Venice Biennale Giardini as a guerrilla art work; and Dancing Pumpkin, an eleven-legged, 9m tall yellow and black sculpture.

The infinity room is the newest in a series of works the artist began making in 1965, when she was living and working in New York at the height of the avant-garde movement led by Andy Warhol.