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World-famous Japanese artist Yayoi Kasuma takes residence at AGSA with immersive pumpkin installation

Famed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sets up her signature style art installation at AGSA taking viewers on a journey through her mind as 10-year old.

All images: Art Gallery South Australia

A bright yellow room overrun with black dots and illuminated pumpkin sculptures in endless reflection will enthral visitors at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) when Yayoi Kusama’s THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS opens tomorrow.

Described as ‘the world’s most popular artist’, Yayoi Kusama is best known for her immersive polka-dot and mirror installations. Kusama uses several recurring motifs – dots, eyes, nets, flowers and pumpkins – to investigate repetition and to create sensory experiences that hint at the infinite.

With this installation, Kusama invites viewers to immerse themselves in her world, to participate in an experience of both enveloping and infinite space, and a round trip from the microscopic into the cosmic. Pumpkins are one of Kusama’s most recognisable subjects and have achieved a devoted following.

Here, the dots of the wider room and the pumpkins within the ‘peep-space’, seem to reproduce at an alarming rate, overgrowing their environment and threatening to obliterate the viewer’s body.

AGSA Director, Rhana Devenport ONZM says, ‘Few artists in the world elicit such enthusiastic audience responses as Yayoi Kusama, and we are thrilled to present this immersive installation at AGSA in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, and with thanks to the profound generosity of the Gwinnett family.

‘Adelaide audiences and visitors to our city will delight in this experiential and otherworldly encounter, which, combined with Chiharu Shiota’s popular Absence Embodied, 2018, and our upcoming Japanese ceramics exhibition Pure Form, will offer visitors to AGSA a deep and exemplary experience of contemporary Japanese art.’

THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS, is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition and will be on display in AGSA’s Melrose Wing for twelve months.

National Gallery Director, Nick Mitzevich, said, ‘Kusama’s THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS joins an iconic lineage of her infinity experiences and is one of the National Gallery’s most-loved collection works. We are delighted to loan this work to the Art Gallery of South Australia, where audiences will no doubt be as equally engaged as ours.’

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, Kusama’s career has spanned over 70 years and is considered one of the most significant contemporary artists in the world.

She has presented hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums across the world with large-scale retrospectives of her work seen at the Tate, Centre Pompidou, LACMA, MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art and throughout Latin America and Japan.

Entry is free and bookings are not required.

It opens to the public from Friday 1 April 2022 until 30 April 2023.

Art Gallery of South Australia is located at North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5000

For more information visit the AGSA website.

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