LONDON — Yayoi Kusama: Infinity and Form, a career-spanning retrospective at Tate Modern featuring more than 200 works spanning seven decades and including six new Infinity Mirror Room installations, opened on Thursday to scenes of unprecedented public enthusiasm, with queues forming outside the gallery at 4 AM — three hours before doors opened.
Tickets for the exhibition's first six weeks sold out within ninety minutes of going on sale last month. The gallery has extended opening hours to midnight on weekdays for the duration of the run and says it expects more than 300,000 visitors before the show closes in June — which would make it the most attended exhibition in Tate Modern's twenty-five-year history.
The Work
The retrospective opens with Kusama's early 1950s works on paper from her time in Matsumoto, Japan — intricate obsessive drawings of nets and dots that she has described as a response to hallucinations she experienced as a child. The exhibition then traces a chronological arc through her move to New York in 1957, her involvement with the Fluxus movement, her return to Japan in 1973, and her extraordinary commercial and critical renaissance from the 1990s to the present.
The six new Infinity Mirror Rooms — immersive walk-in installations in which mirrors, lights, and reflective surfaces create the illusion of infinite space — are distributed throughout the galleries, and visitors are given timed slots to enter each one individually.