Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama is one of the world’s most important and recognised practitioners working today. Kusama is renowned globally for her singular and idiosyncratic use of pattern, colour and symbols to create immersive, thought-provoking and intensely personal works of art that transcend language and borders. The artist has made indelible contributions to key art movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including minimalism, pop art, performance and feminist art, and is celebrated today for her instantly recognisable works of art incorporating pumpkin and polka-dot motifs.
About the exhibition
Curated by the NGV in collaboration with the artist especially for Australian audiences, the exhibition Yayoi Kusama includes many works never-before-seen by local audiences as well as a diverse display of the artist’s popular immersive rooms, including the global unveiling of the artist’s most recent immersive infinity mirror room work.
Comprising more than 180 works, the exhibition is the largest ever exhibition of the artist’s work in Australia and one of the most comprehensive retrospectives of the artist ever presented globally. Featuring painting, sculpture, collage, fashion, video and installation, the exhibition reveals the astonishing breadth of Kusama’s multidisciplinary practice.
Yayoi Kusama will be displayed across the entire ground floor of NGV International and extend into NGV’s public spaces and the surrounding Melbourne Arts Precinct including NGV’s iconic Waterwall, Great Hall, and Federation Court.
A major highlight of the exhibition will be an impressive assembly of Kusama’s iconic immersive installations, including her infinity rooms that ingeniously use mirrors to create the visual illusion of infinite space. A new, never-before-seen kaleidoscopic infinity mirror room, currently in development especially for the exhibition, will make its global premiere in Melbourne.
The exhibition also includes the Australian debut of Dancing Pumpkin, a towering 5-metre-tall bronze sculpture newly acquired by the NGV with the support of the Loti and Victor Smorgon fund. Conceived by the artist in 2020, Dancing Pumpkin takes her iconic motif into new and surprising conceptual terrain and allows audiences to walk under the towering sculpture.
The exhibition also features the Australian premiere of THE HOPE OF THE POLKA DOTS BURIED IN INFINITY WILL ETERNALLY COVER THE UNIVERSE, 2019, which visually entangles viewers within 6 metre-high tentacular forms covered in yellow-and-black polka dots.
A further highlight will be the presentation of Narcissus Garden, a new iteration of the installation Kusama first presented unofficially at the Venice Biennale in 1966. This installation comprises 1400 stainless silver balls, each 30cm in diameter and presented en masse as visitors enter the Gallery. The NGV will have an opportunity to acquire this work for its Collection through the 2024 Annual Appeal, which invites philanthropic donations of any size.
Our public spaces will also be transformed by Kusama’s signature polka-dots, extending the sensory experience of Kusama’s work beyond the exhibition galleries to include a site-specific artwork for the NGV’s iconic Waterwall and an installation of enormous balloons that will float playfully over visitors’ heads in NGV International’s Great Hall, titled Dots Obsession.