Yayoi Kusama, Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, 2002/2024, St Kilda Road, Melbourne / NGV. Photography: © Tobias Titz / YAYOI KUSAMA.
The National Gallery of Victoria is pulling out all the stops for its blockbuster Yayoi Kusama exhibition, which boasts a record-breaking number of Infinity Rooms and a five-metre-tall Dancing Pumpkin sculpture in its Federal Court. But the celebration is also spilling out into the streets of Melbourne, as more than 60 plane trees in front of the gallery have been clad in the artist’s pink and white polka dots.
In 2002, Kusama covered the Kirishima Open Air Museum in Japan’s trees in red and white polka dot fabric for a work called Ascension of Polka Dots on Trees. Kusama has adopted a hot pink and white colour scheme for this 2024/25 Aussie iteration along St Kilda Road. The gallery’s glass waterfall will also be pink, with black dots to match.
The exhibition opens on 15 December 2024. It will be the largest Kusama retrospective in Australian history and one of the biggest globally, featuring almost 200 works ranging from immersive rooms to polka dot paintings and her famous pumpkins. A new version of her 1966 Narcissus Garden will also debut, featuring 1400 silver orbs set around the museum’s waterfall and Federation court.
The retrospective will delve into more than eight decades of her intensely personal art, created in her hometown in Matsumoto and the US in the 1960s and 70s, to her most recent works produced in her Tokyo studio.
Yayoi Kusama is at NGV International from 15 December 2024 to 21 April 2025. See more for tickets.
