Adelaide’s latest immersive art exhibit is here, and boy is this going to look a treat on Instagram! If you loved the recent Van Gogh exhibit, Yayoi Kusama’s The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens is going to be right up your alley.
That’s right, a bright yellow room overrun with black dots and illuminated pumpkin sculptures in endless reflection will enthral visitors at the Art Gallery of South Australia, opening this Friday 1 April.
Described as ‘the world’s most popular artist’, Yayoi Kusama is best known for her immersive polka-dot and mirror installations. Over the course of her 70-year-long career, she has engaged with an array of media and an expansive idea of perception, space and the human body. Kusama uses several recurring motifs – dots, eyes, nets, flowers and pumpkins – to investigate repetition and to create sensory experiences that hint at the infinite.
AGSA Director, Rhana Devenport ONZM says,
‘Adelaide audiences and visitors to our city will delight in this experiential and otherworldly encounter, which, combined with Chiharu Shiota’s popular Absence Embodied, 2018, and our upcoming Japanese ceramics exhibition Pure Form, will offer visitors to AGSA a deep and exemplary experience of contemporary Japanese art.’
Experience both enveloping and infinite space
With this installation, Kusama invites viewers to immerse themselves in her world, to participate in an experience of both enveloping and infinite space, and a round trip from the microscopic into the cosmic. With their disarming anthropomorphic forms, pumpkins are one of Kusama’s most recognisable motifs and have attained the status of fetishised objects within her oeuvre. Here, the dots of the wider room and the pumpkins within the ‘peep-space’, seem to reproduce at an alarming rate, overgrowing their environment and threatening to obliterate the viewer’s body.
The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition and will be on display in AGSA’s Melrose Wing for twelve months.
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