Yayoi Kusama’s Sellout Show: How To Get Tickets

Art exhibitions at commercial galleries don’t usually sell out or involve queues, unless the art is by Yayoi Kusama, the world’s top-selling artist, according to a recent report by Hiscox. Opening this week is the Japanese artist’s latest show Every Day I Pray For Love, her fourteenth solo exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery.

If you’ve ever had a chance to enter one of Kusama’s famous mirrored rooms, you’ll know what the fuss is about. They are always a trippy, sparkly, fabulous experience. As art historian James Payne explains in his Great Art Explained short film on Kusama, her mirrored rooms were one of the earliest installation artworks that encouraged viewers to enter and experience rather than to just passively view a picture in a frame.

Kusama’s recent exhibition of mirrored rooms at Tate Modern was repeatedly extended due to popular demand and ran for three years. This show at Victoria Miro debuts Infinity Mirrored Room – Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart, an immersive work that envelops visitors inside a pulsating, light-filled, hexagonal space. The ceiling is colored flashing LED lights arranged in a concentric pattern whose reflections produce an infinite honeycomb. A large, mirrored sphere hangs in the centre of the space where you’ll see endless distorted reflections of yourself. Kusama has been experimenting with mirrors and reflection for sixty years. This new work incorporates the dynamic, interactive relationship between the mirror and the sphere, with a nod to two of her iconic early works, Infinity Mirrored Room – Love Forever (1966) and Narcissus Garden (1966).

Two large-scale stuffed fabric installations also dominate the upper and lower galleries. Death of Nerves, 2022 consists of numerous multicolored sewn, stuffed-fabric elements reminiscent of tendrils, vines or even a nervous system, suspended from the ceiling beams of the upper gallery, coming to rest on the ground floor fifteen metres below. Also upstairs is a new work The Moment of Regeneration, 2024, a cluster of red-and-black sewn, stuffed fabric forms that look like a mini forest. These polka dotted trees illustrating the cycles of growth and decay inherent to all life seem to embody an optimism for renewal.

Alongside the soft sculptures in the upper gallery are dozens of new paintings from the artist’s most recent series, Every Day I Pray for Love, 2021-ongoing. Often minutely detailed, with characteristically bold accents of color, some paintings feature eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including dots and nets with which the artist’s name is synonymous.

Outdoors, beside the pond, is is Ladder to Heaven, 2024, a polished stainless steel sculpture almost four metres high. Nearby, visitors will recognize three characters from the paintings indoors, here as new sculptures. Every Day I Pray for Love – Women, Every Day I Pray for Love – Women with Necklaces and Every Day I Pray for Love – Women’s Profiles, 2024, are derived directly from imagery found within Kusama’s Every Day I Pray for Love paintings. These sculptures, the first of their kind, initiating a new series of bronze works, bring to lively three-dimensional form the hand-drawn female faces which feature in several of Kusama’s most recent paintings.

As the title suggests, this is a show of reflection in every sense of the word, pensive but ultimately optimistic.

Tickets are free but currently sold out. However, it could still be possible to visit. Returned tickets will be released automatically on the booking page so it’s worth checking. And, starting on Monday 30 September, a limited number of additional tickets will be released online every Monday at 12noon for entry Tuesday to Saturday of the same week.

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray For Love, 25 September–2 November 2024. Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW