Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first solo exhibition of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Moscow. Plunging the spectator into a series of extraordinary, immersive environments, the exhibition will offer Garage visitors a unique sensory and psychological experience that will extend from the West Gallery into the Auditorium and out into Gorky Park.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Theory features two of the artist’s groundbreaking installations: Infinity Mirrored Room–The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), consists of a room with mirrored walls filled with thousands of small lights, which appear as pulsating dots. These are infinitely reflected in the mirrors to create an illusory cosmos, which is experienced by a lone viewer, enabling each visitor to momentarily get lost in Kusama’s mesmerizing world. Conversely, the installation Guidepost to the Eternal Space (2015) invites audiences to gather amidst an environment in which white polka dots on a red background cover walls and structures, forming an outlandish landscape, confusing viewers’ perception and spatial orientation.
Complimenting the installations, Walking Piece (1966), which is one of Kusama’s earliest works, is a slide film, which shows the artist walking the streets of New York in a traditional Japanese kimono with a parasol. In Garage Auditorium, a film of the performance Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) will be presented weekly. One of Kusama’s best known works, it shows how the artist covers the objects, animals, and people around her with endless colored dots. Beyond the Museum, an urge to extend her artistic gesture into the world outside the gallery is what inspired Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees, a project that Kusama has taken to various public spaces around the world. In Gorky Park, trees in avenue will be wrapped in red cloth decorated with white polka dots.
Kusama’s obsession with creating works using colored dots have their roots in the artist’s psyche, wherein hallucinations have haunted her since her childhood. In her memoirs, she recalls sometimes seeing the pattern in paintings spilling over the edges of the canvas to envelop her and everything around her, dissolving her inner self in the outside world. Later, she would use this perceptual experience, which shifts boundaries between fact and illusion, the real and the imaginary, to create works in a variety of media, from drawing, painting, and installation to sculpture, video, and performance.
Infinity Theory is organized by Yulia Aksenova, Garage Curator.
Thanks go to KUSAMA Enterprise, Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner for their assistance in the preparation of this exhibition.
