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This work is a landscape of inflated, polka-dotted tentacular forms extending from the floor and the ceiling. These irregular snaking shapes are illuminated and gradually change colour. The walls are clad with mirrors, reflecting this fantastical landscape into infinity. The artist’s voice can be heard reciting her poem ‘Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears’. Written in 2010, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s desire to spread a universal message of love.
Vinyl balloons hanging over the gallery cafe/rest area
Sex Obsession
1992, synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Like a pit of writhing snakes or a tangle of suffocating vines, Sex Obsession confronts the viewer with an image of overpowering force. As in Kusama’s earlier Infinity Net paintings, a web of biomorphic forms creeps to the edges of the canvas, creating a tension that threatens to explode into three-dimensional space. The pattern on this painting – yellow dots of varying size that define yellow tendril-like shapes – is very important in Kusama’s visual language. It appears on her sculptures, on clothing designed by the artist, and in the large immersive work The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, 2019.
Kusama first saw a pumpkin as a primary-school student while visiting a seed-harvesting nursery with her grandfather. Among yellow flowering vines, she discovered a pumpkin the size of a man’s head and, as she went to pluck it, it began to speak to her in an animated manner. Enchanted by its charming nature, the young Kusama adopted the pumpkin as a recurring motif in her art.
Kusama created her first pumpkin painting as a teenager in 1946. She likened the ritual of painting pumpkins to Zen meditation: ‘I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else, and concentrate my mind entirely on the form before me.’
In the late 1970s Kusama returned to one of the most nurturing and wondrous life forms of her childhood. Initially painting yellow-and-black or black-and-white dotted pumpkins, she has seamlessly transformed the image of the pumpkin into sculptures, infinity mirror rooms and a multitude of commercial products, elevating it to one of the most recognised icons of contemporary art worldwide.
In the early 2000s Kusama began to produce darkened celestial mirror rooms. Varying in terms of their size and contents, these rooms are united by the use of a light source replicated endlessly with mirrors. Chandelier of Grief features a single baroque-style chandelier suspended inside a glass prism in the centre of a mirror-clad hexagonal room. The chandelier rotates slowly, its flickering light reflecting in every direction, creating the illusion of endless chandeliers. The viewer’s body is similarly multiplied into a dark and distant void. This disorienting experience – witnessing a seemingly infinite world within a confined space – connects to Kusama’s desire for us to consider our place within the universe.
