Yayoi Kusama @ Victoria Miro


When someone mentions the name Yayoi Kusama our first thoughts turn to bright colours and dozens and dozens of polkadots. However, a recent show at Victoria Miro shows that the Japanese artist has recently taken a different turn.

White Infinity Nets is made up of just that. A lot of white, under the guise of nets. Every single on display at the gallery is completely void of colour. It is almost clinical. It is clean, but not clinical. Over the top of the images are painted white nets. We can see this in the thick texture of the white on the blank canvases. Despite this, many of the images are multitonal. Different shades of grey become apparent. Some of the images are reminiscent to me of flowers.

In Britain, we are most familiar with the images shown in last years Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern. However, these infinity nets were first produced in the 1950s. Consequently these images have been revisited again and again over the years and are now for the first time on display in Europe at the new Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair.

The exhibition is somewhat refreshing. The eyes can take a break from the loud bright images that are dominating contemporary art these days. What is also different is here the dots become secondary to the nets, where in the images on display last year, the dots seem to come before the background.

White Infinity Nets are on display at Victoria Miro until 9 November at Victoria Miro

Posted by

Lizzy Vartanian Collier aka Gallery Girl is a writer and curator based in London. Her work has been featured in publications including Dazed, Hyperallergic and Vogue Arabia. She was curator of Perpetual Movement during AWAN Festival 2018 and in 2019 had a residency at the Lab at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan. She has also worked with Armenia Art Fair for its inaugural edition and previously worked as an editor at I.B.Tauris Publishers. In 2019 she co-founded Arsheef, Yemen’s first contemporary art gallery. She has given workshops at Manara Culture in Amman, Jordan and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK. As of 2020 she is currently in law school, with the ambition of greater understanding the intersection between art and the law.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s