SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum presents Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (June 30–September 10, 2017), exploring the contemporary Japanese artist’s 65-year career. Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the exhibition comes to Seattle—the city of Kusama’s first North American solo show in 1957—after opening to record-breaking crowds in Washington, D.C. The in-depth survey of the artist’s work offers an unprecedented opportunity for visitors to experience five of her iconic, immersive, multi-reflective Infinity Mirror Rooms, alongside more than 60 works on paper, sculptures, and largescale paintings from the 1950s to the present, including the West Coast debut of vibrant works the artist recently created in her Tokyo studio.

Infinity Mirrors traces Yayoi Kusama’s development from the 1950s to the present. In her early work of the 1950s, the artist addressed her experiences growing up in Japan during World War II with dark, abstract forms in paintings and watercolors. By the 1960s, her interests evolved toward producing immaterial environments, such as Accumulation (1962), a soft sculpture of stuffed cylindrical fabric forms on a wooden chair frame.

Beginning in 1965, Kusama began introducing mirrors as reflective devices in her work with the Infinity Mirror Rooms. Initially motivated by an interest in the idea of “self-obliteration” and political liberation during the Vietnam War, the more recent examples see Kusama’s interest turning more toward a cosmic social harmony. The five rooms presented in this exhibition were created at various times over five decades, with the most recent room created in 2016.

Four of the five Infinity Mirror Rooms on view allow visitors to enter the room, immersing themselves in various environments: large balloons, suspended LED lights, phallic stuffed objects, or Kusama’s beloved pumpkins. The fifth room offers a voyeuristic experience: viewers look through a peep hole, seeing a flurry of flashing lights reflected off the mirrored walls.

The exhibition also marks the West Coast debut of My Eternal Soul (2016), a series of Kusama’s most recent paintings, as well as the recently realized Infinity
Room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016), featuring an infinite field of her signature pumpkins.

With The Obliteration Room (2002-present), visitors enter an all-white staged living room and are given multicolored dot stickers to adorn every surface. Growing out of Kusama’s participation in the communal happenings of the 1960s, this interactive room casts visitors in the role of artist. By the closing of the exhibition, the room will be completely filled with a riot of colorful dots.

“This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to see the life’s work of a true visionary,” says Catharina Manchanda, SAM’s Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “Taken together, Kusama’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and infinity mirror rooms add up to a Gesamtkunstwerk [total art work]. Her web-like structures are reminiscent of both microscopic cell formations and macroscopic visions of outer space. My tip is to look closely at these works; they are the key to understanding the infinity mirror rooms.”

The traveling exhibition opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (February 23–May 14, 2017). From Seattle, it will travel to The Broad in Los Angeles (October 21, 2017–January 1, 2018), the Art Gallery of Ontario (March 3– May 27, 2018), the Cleveland Museum of Art (July 7–September 30, 2018), and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (November 18, 2018–February 17, 2019).