Yayoi Kusama © YAYOI KUSAMA Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts — Yayoi Kusama © YAYOI KUSAMA | Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, is celebrating the illustrious career of iconic contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama with a spectacular exhibition spanning her eight-decade practice, including the global unveiling of the artist’s most recent immersive infinity mirror room work.

The exhibition Yayoi Kusama features 200 works, many never-before-seen in Australia. A highlight is the artist’s showstopping immersive artworks. Displayed across the entire ground floor of NGV International, Yayoi Kusama is one of the most comprehensive retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s work ever presented globally.

The exhibition traces her entire career – from her childhood in the 1930s through to the present-day – through a rich selection of works drawn from the artist’s personal collection, private collections and premier institutions across Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia. Featuring painting, sculpture, collage, fashion, video and installation, the exhibition reveals the astonishing breadth of Kusama’s multidisciplinary practice.

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama's Dots Obsession, 1996/2024, as part of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne until 21 April 2025. © YAYOI KUSAMA Photo: Sean Fennessy

Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama is one of the world’s most important and recognised artists working today. She is renowned globally for her singular and idiosyncratic use of pattern, colour and symbols to create immersive, thoughtprovoking and intensely personal works of art. She has made indelible contributions to key art movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including minimalism, pop art and feminist art.

A major highlight is the world-premiere work, Infinity Mirrored Room–My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, 2024, which invites visitors into a spectacular space that opens into a seemingly infinite celestial universe. The never-before-seen new work is the latest infinity mirror room by Kusama, a format that ingeniously uses mirrors to create the optical illusion of infinity within a confined space.

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room–My Heart is Filled to theBrim with Sparkling Light, 2024, ondisplay at the NGV International, Melbourne for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition from 15 December 2024-21 April 2025. © YAYOI KUSAMA Photo: Sean Fennessy

Since debuting her first mirrored environments in the 1960s, Kusama has continued to craft immersive installations that invite visitors to experience her boundless vision. Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms have been staged the world over and are among the most celebrated works in her oeuvre.

The exhibition also includes the Australian debut of Dancing Pumpkin, a towering 5-metre-tall yellow-and-black polkadotted bronze sculpture newly acquired by the NGV. Conceived by the artist in 2020, Dancing Pumpkin takes her iconic motif to new heights, allowing audiences to walk under the towering sculpture.

Installation view of The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens 2015 on display as part of Yayoi Kusama at NGV International, Melbourne until 21 April 2025. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Photo: Sean Fennessy

The exhibition also features the Australian premiere of The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, 2019, which visually entangles viewers within 6-metre-high tentacular forms covered in yellow-and-black polka dots.

Another highlight is Narcissus Garden, 1966/2024, a new iteration of the installation Kusama first presented unofficially at the Venice Biennale in 1966. This installation comprises of 1400 stainless silver balls, each 30cm in diameter and presented en masse as visitors enter the Gallery. As the metallic spheres reflect one another, they create an infinitely recurring landscape that envelops the spectator.

NGV International’s public spaces have also been transformed by Kusama’s signature polka dots, extending the sensory experience of Kusama's work beyond the exhibition galleries to include a site-specific artwork for the NGV’s iconic waterwall, and Dots Obsession, an installation of enormous inflated spheres that will float playfully over visitors’ heads in the Great Hall.

Yayoi Kusama’s Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, 2002/2024, on display along St Kilda Road, Melbourne for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition until 21 April 2025. © YAYOI KUSAMA. Photo: Tobias Titz

Extending Kusama’s kaleidoscopic worldview beyond the walls of the NGV, Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees envelops more than 60 plane trees along Melbourne’s iconic grand boulevard St Kilda Road in a pink-and-white polka-dotted artwork.

Through rarely seen materials drawn from the artist’s own archive, including photographs, film, letters, magazines, posters and other ephemera, the exhibition also draws attention to Kusama’s radical performance art, fashion designs and activism of the late-1960s. The presentation reveals how Kusama’s performances, photoshoots, protests and other events – known as “happenings” – became vehicles for the exploration of radical ideas, such as sexual liberation. Also on display are experimental fashion designs first created by Kusama during this period.

Yayoi Kusama is on display until 21 April 2025 at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne.
For further information visit ngv.melbourne