Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe

After her Infinity Net paintings, Kusama employed the accumulation of reused materials in collages and soft sculptures of repetitive patterns. More than an obsessive-compulsive tendency or an innate desire for repetition, the notion of accumulating in Kusama’s art can be understood as a yearning to expand her creative vision. In these works, an everyday element, such as a chair, is transformed by the proliferation of multiple protuberances of stuffed and sewn phallic forms that mask the object entirely, and also its function.

In 1963, Kusama presented one of her accumulation pieces at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York: a rowing boat buried under hundreds of fabric protuberances that occupied the center of the exhibition Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show. The walls and ceiling of the room were covered with black wallpaper where the image of the boat was repeated again and again in white like a pattern. Two years later, Kusama created what would be the first of her mirror rooms, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli's Field (1965). In this work, hundreds of soft protuberances, made from white fabric colonized by her distinctive red polka-dots of different sizes, occupied the entire floor of a small space multiplied by mirrors.

The 1960s were a very productive decade for the artist, but the lack of official recognition, together with the exhaustion of working non-stop at a frantic pace triggered a crisis that led her to return to Japan and retreat from public life. During that time, she recovered the practice of art as therapy, allowing her to continue working on both her art and her literature. It was not until the late 1980s that her work finally began to be gain recognition internationally and to appear publicly in exhibitions. In 1991, Kusama resumed work on her Infinity Mirror Rooms, of which she has made around thirty to date, some in single edition format and others in multiple but limited edition.

With Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe (2020), one of the last made by the artist, now in her 90s, Yayoi Kusama brings us back into an immersive experience that makes us partakers of her obsessive universe and conveys to us the need for “self-obliteration,” inviting us to disappear into the vibrant play of colorful lights endlessly multiplied by the mirrored walls of this infinite room.