Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama, popular for her large flower and pumpkin sculptures, has a new exhibition on at Victoria Miro galleries in Islington, London. Last year, she had a popular sell-out exhibition in London, so this was a smaller-scale one. The exhibition is free to visit and available in timed slots from the beginning of October until the middle of December, though it is now fully-booked. For those who did not get to go, the photographs and write-up will (I hope) make up for it in some way.
The gallery was separated into four parts. The first part was upstairs at the "Infinity Mirrored Room". Visitors were put into a queue system in order to go into the small room, and between three and five people entered the room at a time. Once inside, we got to look at the mirrored colour-changing orbs for a whole fourty-five seconds, which went super-quickly. Personally, I think we should have been given slightly longer and it was a lot to take in after just arriving and rushing to get to the gallery. (The gallery is a little over a twelve-minute walk from the closest tube stations, so commuting, waiting, and being ushered in for such a short time was what I found difficult to get into the mindset. This was a pity because I felt that it was the star of the exhibition.)
After the mirrored room, the exhibition continued downstairs with a room full of paintings and pumpkins. The colours of the room were the primary colours of red, yellow and green. A pumpkin sculpture of each colour was in the room, and the paintings hung on the walls featured pumpkins or dots, which created patterns.
The next part of the exhibition led to an outside garden behind the galleries. This area included a little pond and trees and was a perfect setting for the giant and colourful flowers that Yayoi Kusama is known for. (The collection of the flowers is called "FLOWERS THAT SPEAK ALL ABOUT MY HEART GIVEN TO THE SKY"). For those readers who have ever visited Lille in France, her giant flower sculptures are located right outside the train station there. The outside area had three of these flowers. As my time slot for the exhibition was in the late afternoon on a rainy day, capturing the sculptures was a challenge.
After seeing the outside terrace, the exhibition continued in the neighbouring building and on a ride up an elevator to the first floor where several large-scale paintings were hung on the walls. The series of artwork is in Kusama's "My Eternal Soul" collection. The collection uses bright and solid colours with various illustrations, shapes and patterns.
This was the last room in the exhibition. Visitors could spend as long as they wanted in the other rooms to admire the art. Overall, I spent about thirty minutes at the exhibition. The highlight was the infinity mirrored room, though I do like the large pumpkin sculptures too. I was less keen on the last room of the exhibition. I did not get to go to the exhibition last year, so I cannot comment on how this exhibition compared.
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