The contemporary artist known for her works of color, repetition, interaction and immersion, Yayoi Kusama, opened her latest show, Festival of Life, to the public at both of David Zwirner’s New York galleries this weekend.

The shows include sixty-six large-scale paintings from her My Eternal Soul series, three large-scale, stainless steel flower sculptures, an immersive red and white polka dot room with larger-than-life flower pot sculptures, and two new Infinity Mirror Rooms. At the opening reception at the Chelsea gallery where the new works were revealed, the lines snaked down 19th street (where the gallery lives) around the corner to 10th Avenue.

The work of the Japanese artist has captured the attention of the public en masse in a way art rarely does. During a recent exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, attendees waited up to three hours to enter to see the work for a mere 30-seconds, and that was with so-called fast passes. Almost 400,000 visitors went to see that show, an unprecedented amount of traffic for an art exhibition.

“When we staged her first show six years ago and had our first Infinity Room, we didn’t know that the public would react the way it did, and we didn’t know what social media would do,” says Zwirner in an interview at the gallery during a private preview.

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Image: The Polka-dot immersion room by Yayoi Kusama on view now until December 16th at David Zwirner's Chelsea gallery.

Forbes, profile by Rebecca Suhrawardi