Yayoi Kusama: My Eternal Soul paintings

Spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden, this major exhibition features new paintings – including her important, ongoing My Eternal Soul series and signature Infinity Nets – iconic pumpkin sculptures, and immersive mirror rooms, all conceived specially for this presentation. 

These new works reflect her lifelong preoccupation with the infinite and sublime, as well as the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, as found in pattern and repetition. 

Distilled within her paintings are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art. On show at Victoria Miro Mayfair, examples from her ongoing My Eternal Soul series encapsulate a surreal and humorous, as well as instinctual, approach to art making. Each painting abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile and other more indeterminate forms recalling cell structures, often in pulsating combinations of colour. Some appear psychedelically primordial: TALKS OF A FLOWER GARDEN floats fringed biomorphs with jewel-like nuclei suspended in shades of sky blue against a fiery expanse of orange. Composing lines, marks and dots in sedimentary-like layers, other examples, such as MY HEART’S ABODE and MY ETERNAL LIFE, bring to mind ancient landscapes and grand geological patterns.