Step inside Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama‘s Infinity Mirror rooms, seemingly endless spaces made from mirrors, patterns, darkness, and light. The six rooms were filmed by NPR at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum, where they’ll be on exhibit from February 23 to May 14, 2017. From the Hirshhorn:
Born in 1929, Kusama grew up near her family’s plant nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. At nineteen, following World War II, she went to Kyoto to study the traditional Japanese style of painting known as Nihonga. During this time, she began experimenting with abstraction, but it was not until she arrived in the United States, in 1957, that her career took off. Living in New York from 1958 to 1973, Kusama moved in avant-garde circles with such figures as Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow while honing her signature dot and net motifs, developing soft sculpture, creating installation-based works, and staging Happenings (performance-based events). She first used mirrors as a multireflective device in Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965, transforming the intense repetition that marked some of her earlier works into an immersive experience. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 but has continued to develop her mirrored installations, and over the years, she has attained cult status, not only as an artist, but as a novelist.
The exhibition will tour to the Seattle Art Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art through 2019.
Next: Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room.
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