Yayoi Kusama

Victoria Miro is pleased to announce a two-part exhibition by revered Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama.

Born in 1929, Yayoi Kusama is one of the most influential and widely recognised artists of her generation. A contemporary and peer of Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, Kusama first came to prominence in the early 1960s while living in New York. Now living and working in Tokyo, Kusama continues to produce a significant body of work more than four decades on. Part One of the exhibition will be presented at Victoria Miro 14 in October 2007 and will include new infinity net paintings, while Part Two will be presented at Victoria Miro 16 in February 2008. Kusama first exhibited with the gallery in 1998 and has not had a solo exhibition in London since the Serpentine Gallery survey in 2000.

Yayoi Kusama's art is preoccupied by two interchangeable motifs, which can be traced back to early hallucinations she first experienced in childhood - the dense, repetitive patterns she calls 'infinity nets' and multiplying polka dots. This obsessive and condensed vision has shaped her life and work - the net and dot form repeated infinitely and identically, eventually leading to self-obliteration:

"I had a desire to prophecy and measure the infinity of the boundless universe from my own position with each dot, with an accumulation of particles which are the negative of the holes in the net".

On exhibition are a number of monochromatic paintings commissioned especially for the vast gallery spaces, including one work over 5m in length, reminiscent of the very first white net paintings Kusama exhibited at Brata Gallery, New York in 1959. Physically and optically arresting in scale, these paintings create a disconcerting sense of depth, the nets seemingly advancing as if to envelop the viewer and the entire space.  They are compositions with no defined beginning, middle or end - evoking the 'infinity' of their title and presenting complexity and subtlety within a rigorously worked minimal structure.