Yellow tentacles decorated with rhythmic patterns of dots swirl around a room; the patterns echo on the floor and the walls. Reflections bounce off mirrors, blurring the boundaries of the space at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.
The installation – specially created for an exhibition of the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who died Aug. 14 at age 97 – is titled "Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope Of The Polka Dots Buried In Infinity Will Eternally Cover The Universe.”
The room is at the heart of the exhibition at the Stedelijk that opens this week, just two weeks after her death. What was to have been a retrospective has turned into a posthumous celebration of one of the globe's best-known contemporary artists, who depicted her world splashed with polka dots and other repetitive motifs.
"We heard about her passing,” exhibition curator Leontine Coelewij told The Associated Press (AP). "We decided to make it really a tribute. A tribute to her life. Tribute to her work, so that everybody can see what she is ... to us. So many wonderful works.”
Kusama's signature dots greet visitors before they even get into the museum in Amsterdam. They are plastered across its facade and even on red fabric wrapped around trees on the adjacent Museum Square.
Coelewij said that painting the dots was a way for the artist to process hallucinations she had from a young age. Among the works on display is a huge pumpkin made of fiber-reinforced plastic and polyurethane paint, its yellow skin covered in lines of black dots of varying sizes.
"So a lot of her work comes from these mental issues that she had,” Coelewij said. "And I think she made something beautiful out of it for her. It was also a way to explore ideas about infinity, for instance, like, how do we relate to the universe, to the cosmos, to the world around us?”
Kusama had long-standing links to the Netherlands and the Stedelijk. She was active in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities in the freewheeling 1960s, and her work was closely aligned with the ZERO movement established in the late 1950s by German artists, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene.
She was part of a landmark exhibition by the movement, also at the Stedelijk, in 1965. A photo from that Amsterdam exhibition shows Kusama, wearing a white kimono, standing among artists from the movement — mostly men in suits and ties.
"She really liked the whole atmosphere in the Netherlands, which was rather open and tolerant, liberal,” Coelewij said. "She was also part of the counterculture of that moment, the hippie culture. You know, Amsterdam was the magical center, and she felt very much at home here.”
The new exhibition spans several rooms before going up an escalator lined with mirrors to reach the infinity room installation one floor up.
It's Coelewij's favorite part of the show, created for the exhibition that was previously staged at Museum Ludwig in the German city of Cologne.
"There’s a lot of mirrors, there’s tentacles, there’s a lot of color, and it’s a ... you can say hallucinating world. You really step into her mind,” Coelewij said.
It's a fitting tribute to the artist who said 10 years ago that she felt her life was nearing its end but she was "still fighting to the death for my art.”
"I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead,” Kusama had said.
The exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk opens on Friday and runs through Jan. 17.
