Kusama Takes On the Infinite With a Sly Wink

Critic's Pick

The Japanese artist's new exhibition in Manhattan includes undulating pumpkins and graphic paintings, but her latest Infinity Mirror Room is the star of the show.

Yayoi Kusama's latest "Infinity Mirror Room," at David Zwirner Gallery in Manhattan, is titled "Dreaming of Earth's Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love."Credit...Peter Fisher for The New York Times

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By Will Heinrich

Once a high-profile fixture of the 1960s New York avant-garde, Yayoi Kusama has long since become an icon, in the sense of a visually recognizable brand. Her polka dots, her spectacular sculptures of flowers and pumpkins, and most of all her "Infinity Mirror Rooms," which regularly draw crowds willing to wait hours for as little as one minute inside — it's all as familiar, and as reliably perfect, as Coca-Cola. Like Coca-Cola, it also goes with anything: A recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton even included Instagram and Snapchat filters.

The downside of being a brand might be a certain predictability. But being so well known actually provides a visual thinker as adept and inventive as Kusama with a kind of head start on shocking and delighting her audience, because she can achieve so much just by tweaking our expectations. Her latest‌ room, ‌a 13-foot-high white cube with a fully mirrored interior‌ titled "Dreaming of Earth's Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love," is as close as pop art comes to a revelation.

Unlike most previous ‌rooms, this one, which is currently showing at David Zwirner Gallery in Manhattan as part of the new exhibition "I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers," has windows large enough to see through from the inside — ‌16 full, half or quarter circles colored red, yellow, green or blue. Each partial circle is hard against an edge, so that, with its reflection, it appears whole. Among other things, this means that your gaze doesn't pause at the edge, instead gliding painlessly right into the mirror world.

Where previous infinity rooms flirted with claustrophobia, now, because you can keep half an eye on the everyday world, you’ll contemplate the infinite with bemusement. You might catch a reflection of your own legs superimposed on someone outside, as in a Dan Graham pavilion, or find yourself peering out curiously at the yellow-tinted gallery.

From other angles the circles are opaque, evoking a Modernist disco party as they bubble into the distance. As usual, the best action happens in the corners, where you can watch miniature reflections of yourself walk right past one another — your ego snubbing your id, or vice versa — or convene four of your doppelgängers in an intimate tête-à-tête. I was so interested in all my own miniature critics that I didn't notice the crisp, full-size reflection right in front of me until just before I stepped out.

Along with the mirrored room, "I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers" includes three enormous steel flowers; three yellow and black "pumpkin" walls polished to a sports-car shine; and nearly three dozen new acrylic paintings. Graphic, boldly colored compositions of dots and lines, the paintings reach across the room and grab you by the collar, particularly one untitled canvas from 2021, which is just slightly too busy to take in at a glance. The flowers are charming, if nothing more, but the pumpkins, with their hat-like stems and sexy undulations, are surprisingly complex and sophisticated.

Still, the "Infinity Mirror Room" is the star, because, as promised by the name, it offers something for everyone and can never be depleted. It's a high-concept Japanese teahouse whose low yellow door forces you to stoop as you go in. It's a metaphor for consciousness, the art work, or any other ostensibly sealed box of illusory vistas. It's an Instagram-ready spectacle, famous for being famous. It's the very definition of "what you see is what you get," but you could never find every interesting detail, even if you stayed all day.

The only issue is the line, which is first come first served. As a critic, I got to skip to the front, so I asked a few visitors what they thought. Caterina Alves, visiting from London, had waited about an hour and felt it was totally worth it. "First of all, she's amazing," she said, adding, "This is the only free exhibition I’ve found of Kusama." (The gallery will arrange visits for school groups, too.) Gina Noy, close to the door, felt that the hour-plus wait added to the experience. "It's great," she said, gesturing at the women standing behind her, "because we just chatted." And Stephanie Helen, whom I caught up with after she came out, proposed this general advice: "If it's something good, wait on line for it."

Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers

Through July 21 at David Zwirner Gallery, 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, Manhattan. 212-727-2070; davidzwirner.com.

Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer. @willvheinrich

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