Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro Gallery

Jul 3, 2016

Lights, mirrors, pumpkins.

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

All The Eternal Love I Have For Pumpkins 

Yayoi Kusama’s current exhibition takes up both Victoria Miro Gallery in Old Street and Victoria Miro Mayfair. The smaller Mayfair gallery holds the acrylic on canvas artworks while Old Street’s more spacious gallery has three mirror rooms as well as more canvas artworks and a waterside garden display.

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

Talks Of A Flower Garden

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

Shedding Tears To The Season

Both galleries are free to get into and while I was the only visitor in Mayfair, the Old Street site gets very busy – I arrived at 9.30am on a Saturday morning ahead of the gallery’s opening at 10am and there was already a queue snaking quietly down the street as queue members took turns to buy coffee from the drive-in McDonalds on City Road while their companions looked like they were still half asleep.

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

Sending People To The Other World 

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

I loved this exhibition – in Japan pumpkins are thought of as ugly and calling someone a pumpkin-head or pumpkin face is the ultimate insult (but also sort of cute compared to what we call people in this country). The All The Eternal Love I Have For The Pumpkins mirror room was the highlight and the twenty seconds you are allowed to be inside for (in ones or twos) feels like a lot longer. I also love Where The Lights In My Heart Go in which you are plunged into darkness inside a mirrored cube in the garden with only pinpricks of light through which Narcissus Garden can be spotted outside.

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

Where The Lights In My Heart Go 

yayoi kusama victoria miro gallery

Infinity-Nets

The exhibition is on until 30th July, check the opening times here as it’s not open on Sundays and does get very busy.