Yayoi Kusama‘s psychedelic Infinity Mirror Rooms is coming to London. It will be the Tate Modern to showcase the non-place created by the 91-year-old artist for a year. In the last five years, more than five million people around the world have entered her mirror rooms. The exhibition-event was supposed to have opened this year. It was the twentieth anniversary of the museum on the Thames. However, due to the pandemic, it will happen in spring 2021.
Infinity Mirror Room at the Tate Museum
The two rooms’ entrance will be “coronavirus-proof”, with staggered entrances with a “virtual row” and, of course, only with a mask. The entry will be one person at a time. This offers visitors the feeling of being completely immersed in infinity.
Despite being a not so large, the Infinity Mirror Rooms – displays the Brilliance of Life is one of Kusama’s largest installations, certainly the most famous. A game of mirrors, lights and water leads to a distant world, suspended on a walkway overlooking the infinite. As always, the time available to everyone will be very short: just 45 seconds of wonder and breathtaking selfies.
The Chandelier of Grief room will instead be surrounded by crystals. The only source of light in the dark room is a Baroque-style chandelier just above the height of the head.
Yayoi Kusama, the most loved Japanese artist
Kusama exhibitions are always successful. Her works are on the market for several million dollars. She is probably the best known and most loved Japanese artist in the world.
But her climb to success has been fraught with incredible difficulties, as extravagant as her artistic nature is.
Born in 1929, Kusama began painting at the age of 7, coinciding with the emergence of mental and emotional disorders.
Her complicated inner world evolved in parallel with her growth. At 10 she began to hallucinate, both visual and hearing. She sees an aura around objects, and hears plants and animals speak. From this moment, painting becomes the expressive means to communicate her complicated emotional state to the world.
Undoubtedly, one of the themes most dear to Yayoi Kusama is that of infinity. Kusama’s artistic creativity grows and develops in the America of the 50s and 60s, a period in which space research becomes more and more concrete until it reaches the sensational moon landing of 1969. The whole society and culture could not but remain astonished and deeply influenced. Kusama’s response translates into high-level immersive installations.
The first Infinity Mirror Room by Yayoi Kusama is as innovative as it is provocative: Phalli’s field in fact confronts the theme of sexuality. Inaugurated in New York in 1965, this installation is Kusama’s first expression of overcoming the limits of her own productivity, as it allows her phallic sculptures to extend eternally like an infinite field.