Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms return to London for the first time since her 2012 Tate Modern retrospective in an exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery.The exhibition, which runs across the gallery’s spaces in Shoreditch and Mayfair, features entirely new work, apart from the permanent installation of Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden,” 1966, which can be found at the terrace of the Shoreditch site.These recent works include a significant body of paintings, comprising “Infinity Nets” (featuring swirls of one color over a painted canvas in another shade, leaving dots of exposed color) and a pumpkin portrait at Wharf Road, as well as a group of works from the “My Eternal Soul” series (surreal free-associative canvases of patterned dots, faces and eyes in bright colors) in Mayfair. Also exhibited in Shoreditch are three of the artist’s bronze pumpkins.But it’s unlikely that these works are the star attraction. Like the 2 million people who saw her 2013-15 touring exhibition of South America, or the 2,500 people a day queuing around the block during her first exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, you'll want to see the mirror rooms. The gallery has three of them; one featuring more pumpkins (her first mirrored room featuring pumpkins since the 1990s), one featuring a flashing, rotating chandelier; and the highlight of the exhibition, her first outdoor mirrored room, the reflective black interior of which is perforated with holes letting in natural sunlight to create a constellation of star-like lights that literally turn day into star-filled night that was still incredibly effective even on the overcast day of the press view.This last room, entitled “Where the Lights in My Heart Go,” 2016, highlights (or should that be “reflects”) the central issue with Kusama’s art in the 21st century. A huge central theme of the artist’s work is internal reflection, from the infinity nets that partly represent the bottomless despair felt by the artist on occasions, to the mirrored rooms that literally reflect ourselves back at us infinitely from every angle. However, the art often gets hijacked for the purposes of external egotism, with her rooms the home of a million infinitely-reflected Instagram selfies. For an artist whose unofficial Venice Biennale show in the 1960s saw Kusama selling the reflective spheres from her “Narcissus Garden” under a sign reading “YOUR NARCISSIUM (sic) FOR SALE,” this is an issue. So, “Where the Light in my Heart Go” seems like a way forward for the artist, with its reflective black surfaces being impossible to photograph well, allowing for a more contemplative experience that the work merits.Leaving the “Infinity Rooms” in Shoreditch and heading to Mayfair — which, fittingly, feels like an infinite journey on humid Northern and Victoria Line trains, we encounter the “My Eternal Soul” paintings, an intimate contrast to the expansive mirrored rooms. Painted on canvases placed on the floor by Kusama in a trance-like state, these works offer insight to the Kusama who often gets lost in the hype around the mirrored rooms — you would not see Adele singing alongside a “My Eternal Soul” painting like she did inside one of Kusama’s rooms at The Broad museum in LA, for example. These paintings are those of an artist who has been among our greatest painters of internal emotions through abstract art, and reflect Kusama at us just as strongly as her mirrors reflect our own selves. Go to this exhibition for the mirrors, stay for these paintings.
“Yayoi Kusama” runs May 25-July 30 at Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road N1, and Victoria Miro Mayfair, 14 St George Street W1S, London
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