Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023 (detail)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023 (detail)
This exhibition of all new work by Yayoi Kusama features new paintings, new sculptures elaborating on her signature motifs of pumpkins and flowers, and a new Infinity Mirror Room.
Spanning our spaces at 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street in New York City, and on view from May 11 through Friday, July 21, 2023, it is one of the artist’s largest gallery exhibitions to date.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
The exhibition is named after three monumental flower sculptures, each titled I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers. Since the 1950s, Kusama has repeatedly engaged flowers and plants as motifs in her work, inspired by her fascination with the natural world.
Yayoi Kusama
I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, 2023
Stainless steel and urethane paint
98 x 111 x 106 inches (248.9 x 281.9 x 269.2 cm)
Here, the brightly colored, fantastically scaled plants become psychedelic and monstrous, as their exaggerated features compete with the cheerful connotation of flowers.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
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The flowers convey a duality, present throughout Kusama’s work, between life and death, celebration and mourning, figuration and abstraction, with each opposite simultaneously pushed to its limits.
Yayoi Kusama
I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, 2023
Stainless steel and urethane paint
117 1/2 x 128 1/2 x 119 inches (298.4 x 326.4 x 302.3 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, 2023
Stainless steel and urethane paint
136 x 134 x 117 inches (345.4 x 340.4 x 297.2 cm)
Three massive undulating pumpkin sculptures, each titled Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, debut a new form that transfigures the organic pumpkin shapes Kusama has reimagined over several decades.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Yayoi Kusama
Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023
Bronze and urethane paint
136 x 221 x 58 1/2 inches (345.4 x 561.3 x 148.6 cm)
While pumpkins have appeared in Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the mid-1940s, the organic form gained a central importance in her work from the 1980s onwards—notably in one of her first open-air sculptures, Pumpkin (1994), on Naoshima Island in Japan.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
“Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood; they speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”
—YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama
Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023
Bronze and urethane paint
132 x 328 x 163 inches (335.3 x 833.1 x 414 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023
Bronze and urethane paint
125 x 335 x 97 inches (317.5 x 850.9 x 246.4 cm)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023, in Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love is one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, an ongoing series of installations begun in 1965, and it welcomes the viewer into a seemingly infinite universe of dancing natural and artificial light.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023, in Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love , 2023, in Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
The work’s mirrored exterior reflects its surroundings, creating the illusion of blending into the environment, while on the inside light is filtered through colored holes to create a flickering illumination that is constantly in flux.
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023, in Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love , 2023, in Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
“When the people see their own reflection multiplied to infinity they then sense that there is no limit to man’s ability to project himself into endless space.”
—YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama
Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023
Wood, stainless steel, aluminum, tile, acrylic, metal, and paint
158 3/4 x 201 1/8 x 201 1/8 inches (403.2 x 510.8 x 510.8 cm)
The countless reflections created by the mirrors eliminate a fixed perspective and offer glimpses into parallel worlds, just like the artist’s Infinity Nets can be seen to push painting to its spatial limits.
A personal message from Yayoi Kusama on the occasion of the show:
“I’ve Sung the Mind of Kusama
Day by Day,
a Song from the Heart.
O Youth of Today,
Let Us Sing Together a Song from
the Heart of the Universe!”
2023
Portrait of Yayoi Kusama. © YAYOI KUSAMA
Portrait of Yayoi Kusama. © YAYOI KUSAMA
Most of the thirty-six paintings in the exhibition are part of Kusama’s recent series EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE (2021–present), which are being shown by David Zwirner for the first time.
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches (72.7 x 91 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
31 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches (80.3 x 65.2 cm)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Conveying extraordinary vitality and passion, these compositions embody a highly personal, even confessional dimension for Kusama.
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic and ink on canvas
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches (100 x 100 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches (100 x 100 cm)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Vibrant, animated, and densely worked, the paintings are singular explorations of line and form, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
26 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (68 x 65.4 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
Youth Accompanied by Both Death and Life Creeping Up Silently
behind You As Art within Youth As Destiny! , 2021
behind You As Art within Youth As Destiny! , 2021
Acrylic on canvas
17 7/8 x 20 7/8 inches (45.5 x 53 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
Untitled, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches (72.7 x 91 cm)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
“My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.”
—YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama
Love You O My Heart I Want to Eat Cherry Blossoms I Want to Kiss
the Pink Color of Blossoms SAKURA Blossoms I Will Meet with Death
One Day SAKURA SAKURA SAKURA You Touch My Life and
Death O Cherry Blossoms, Thank You , 2021
the Pink Color of Blossoms SAKURA Blossoms I Will Meet with Death
One Day SAKURA SAKURA SAKURA You Touch My Life and
Death O Cherry Blossoms, Thank You , 2021
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches (72.7 x 91 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 23 7/8 inches (72.7 x 60.6 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 23 7/8 inches (72.7 x 60.6 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
28 5/8 x 23 7/8 inches (72.7 x 60.6 cm)
Yayoi Kusama
EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022
Acrylic and ink on canvas
31 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches (80.3 x 65.2 cm)
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
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Hero video: Installation views, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023. © YAYOI KUSAMA
