This week on the now award-winning The Week in Art podcast: Kusama-rama. We take a deep dive into Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots, pumpkins and infinity rooms as shows open in New York, Washington, London and Berlin. We’re joined by three curators: Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern in London, talks about Kusama’s Infinity Rooms; Mika Yoshitake, the curator of an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, explains the fundamental role of plants and nature in Kusama’s art; and Stephanie Rosenthal, director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin, discusses the huge Kusama retrospective that’s just opened there.
Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94) © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms will open to Tate Members from 18 May and then to the wider public from 14 June. It will continue until June 2022.
Two of the Infinity Mirror Rooms, will feature in One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection, an exhibition soon to open at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The museum's currently closed but do visit its website to check for announcements.
KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is at The New York Botanical Garden until 31 October. It's newly-commissioned Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart (2020) opens 3 August.
Yayoi Kusama's My Soul Blooms Forever (2019) at The New York Botanical Garden Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Photo: Robert Benson Photography
Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective continues at the Groipus Bau in Berlin until 1 August. And Stephanie Rosenthal has created a reading list on Kusama for our Book Club. Later this year, the retrospective will travel to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art later this year.
New My Eternal Soul paintings by Kusama will be shown in London, Tokyo, and New York this summer—at Victoria Miro in London from 4 June as part of exhibition of new paintings and sculptures, then at David Zwirner, New York, from 17 June and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, from 19 June.
You can read more about the Kusama exhibitions here.
The Week in Art podcast by The Art Newspaper is available every Friday on our website and all the usual places where you find podcasts. This podcast is sponsored by Christie's.