Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room - Let's Survive Forever

The Speed Art Museum is honored to present Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room– LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER, one of the artist’s seminal immersive artworks that explores ideas of “self-obliteration” through repetition and play with space, light, color, and time. INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM — LET’S SURVIVE FOREVER (2017), which is on special loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario, envelops the visitor inside a large, mirrored space with stainless steel balls suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor. The reflective balls recall Kusama’s installation Narcissus Garden, which was first shown at the 1966 Venice Biennale. This presentation will mark the first time that a major Kusama artwork has ever been on view in Kentucky.

An icon of global contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama has eclipsed art historical categorization even as her multifaceted practice has found kinship over the decades with movements such as Minimalism, Pop Art, and Surrealism. Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, she studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s. Beginning in childhood, the artist was (and continues to be) transfixed and consumed by hallucinations in which the world around her appears to be teeming with repetitive forms. By the mid-1960s, Kusama had become well known in the avant-garde community for her provocative vision, exhibitions, and “happenings.” Since this time, the artist’s remarkable artistic journey has grown to span performance and live events, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and film, as well as commercial design and fashion. Through Kusama’s artworks, we, too, can enter her dynamic worlds of wonder, mystery, and imagination.