August 15, 2017 |
For those who are unaware of Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic brilliance – perhaps you live under a rock – her work is vibrant, fun and sensually engaging. Which is a very vanilla way of saying she’s bloody brilliant, something you probably are already aware of, given that her show last year at London’s Victoria Miro gallery was, after all, the most Instagrammed in the gallery’s history (could there be any greater affirmation of her stature?), with morning queues that would rival any Supreme drop. That’s before you even got to the queues for her Infinity Room installations, where people stood primed, phone in hand, for a thirty-second slot that they would invariably spend looking at the work through the screen of their phone.
But this isn’t a rant about the fetishised consumption of contemporary art in 2017 – we’d need a lot more words for that – no, this is about Yayoi herself, who, at the ripe age of 88, will be opening her very own museum in the centre of Tokyo. Kusama commissioned the build back in 2014, and the lantern-like structure, which wouldn’t look out of place in a museum itself, will house Kusama’s iconic Infinity works on the fourth floor, while the fifth will be dedicated to a reading room and the artist’s personal archive. The inaugural exhibition, ‘Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer To Art‘ is set to open on the 1st October this year. Yayoi, we salute you.
The museum opens October 1st, with advanced tickets available to book online at ¥1,000 ($7.08), on sale August 28th.
