North America’s first Infinity Room

This is part of what makes Dallas so special.  The DMA acquires North America’s first Infinity Room!  So cool…

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is internationally renowned for what she calls the Infinity Mirror Room series.

So, officials at the Dallas Museum of Art were “excited,” as director Agustín Arteaga put it Tuesday, to announce that they have acquired Kusama’s 2016 piece, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, which they describe as “the only Infinity Mirror Room of its kind in a North American collection.”

DMA officials say the piece adds a new dimension to its representation of conceptual art, pop art, minimalism and surrealism.

“We are excited to share this boundary-pushing, experiential work with our visitors and to be the only museum in North America to have one of Kusama’s pumpkin-themed mirror rooms in our collection,” Arteaga said in a statement.

Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016, Courtesy YAYOI KUSAMA Inc., Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London (photography Thierry Bal) Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016, Courtesy YAYOI KUSAMA Inc., Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London (photography Thierry Bal) Yayoi Kusama

The career of Kusama, 88, spans six decades. Her Infinity Mirror Room works are considered some of her most experimental and iconic, often incorporating a variety of illuminated objects.

“When they debuted in 1965,” the DMA noted in its press release, “the mirrored installations represented a radically innovative step in the emergence of an increasingly experiential practice.”

Gavin Delahunty, the DMA’s senior curator of contemporary art, who brought the highly celebrated Jackson Pollock exhibition to Dallas in 2016, calls the Kusama acquisition “a major installation” that highlights one of the artist’s “most intense moments of innovation, in a pioneering six decades of artistic production that has traversed conceptual art, pop, surrealism and minimalism.”

The work was acquired, DMA officials said, through “the generous support” of Dallas-based donors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. It will be on view Oct. 1 through Feb. 25, 2018.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama trained in traditional Japanese painting while also exploring the European and American avant-garde. In the late 1950s, she moved to the United States and soon became part of the New York art scene.

Credit: Dallas News | Original Article