Drawn primarily from the ICA’s permanent collection, this exhibition presents artworks that engage with the pioneering ideas of Yayoi Kusama  (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan). Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama celebrates Kusama’s prescient artistic vision, which since the 1950s has merged techniques of repetition, obsessional patterns, and the activation of the body in search of a path to liberation from psychological and societal constraints. Through her paintings, sculptures, and environments, as well as body art, film, and performance, Kusama channeled the attitudes and realities of the moment but avoided such labels as pop, minimalism, postminimalism, and performance art. Kusama’s peers shared her interest in timeless concepts that pushed the limits of possibility and of imagination: the idea of the infinite; the experience of rapture; the representational power of illusion; and the threshold between life and death. Here, Kusama’s work is presented alongside that of her contemporaries, such as Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta, and other artists whose work builds on her lasting impact on contemporary art through dizzying arrays of forms and colors, infinite reflection, and the evocative vocabulary of the body.

Note: Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING is currently closed following a review of air flow and safety needs during Covid-19.

Educational materials

An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions over her long and influential career. LOVE IS CALLING, which premiered in Japan in 2013, is the most immersive and kaleidoscopic of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Representing the culmination of her artistic achievements, it exemplifies the breadth of her visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. As visitors walk throughout the installation, a sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. A two-minute experience, LOVE IS CALLING is accompanied by a focused presentation drawn from the ICA’s collection titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama that will offer insight into Kusama’s influences and her important legacy on contemporary art.

Kusama is one of today’s most recognized and celebrated artists. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the ICA exhibition Multiplicity; the museum also owns a 1953 drawing by the artist, titled A Flower (No. 14)LOVE IS CALLING is the largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum.

Taylor Davis Selects: Invisible Ground of Sympathy is organized by Boston-based artist Taylor Davis, the first time an artist has been invited to curate an exhibition from the ICA’s permanent collection. In her artwork, Davis explores the relationship between object and viewer, often through precise manipulations of form. Taking up questions of orientation, space, identity, and perception, Davis’s work insists on the unique sense of presence and attention that each viewer brings to an encounter with a work of art. Davis is conceiving of Invisible Ground of Sympathy as an open field in which a constellation of artworks are assembled to activate their different emotional and psychological intensities. Considering themes of precarity, wonder, violence, and beauty, and situating the viewer at its center, Davis presents a personal take on the ineffable complexity of making sense of the present, and of not having language for an experience in the moment.
 

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Credits

Organized by Taylor Davis, guest curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.

Support for Taylor Davis Selects: Invisible Ground of Sympathy is generously provided by the Kristen and Kent Lucken Fund for Photography.