Yayoi Kusama brings colorful dot covered Obliteration Room to New York

Comprising new paintings from the ‘My Eternal Soul’ series, new polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures, and the artist’s widely celebrated installation ‘The Obliteration Room’, Yayoi Kusama‘s exhibition in New York marks the product of a renewed dedication to art making over the past years. The gallery rooms at David Zwirner present three dimensional works, participatory pieces and painted canvasses that tower above exhibition-goers, embodying a continued exploration of form, subject matter, and space, while demonstrating a connection to her work from the past six decades.

The exhibition ‘Give Me Love’ marks first time ‘The Obliteration Room’ has been shown in the united states. Varying from previous iterations of the work, which began as early as 2002, the installation at David Zwirner is built as a traditional, prefabricated American suburban house, rather than taking over one or several gallery rooms.

Within the interior, an all-white, domestic setting containing familiar household objects such as a kitchen counter, couch, and teapot, are all painted the same shade. As visitors enter inside the dwelling, they are handed a set of stickers, each a different brightly colored dot of a varying size. these participants are asked to leave their mark wherever they choose, placing the sticky circles anywhere and everywhere. the space gradually transforms as a result of the interaction and the mass accumulation of the dots ultimately changes the white interior until it becomes an unrecognizable blur of colors.

Dotted patterns have become a recurring motif throughout Kusama’s oeuvre, nothing their relevance in her life at an early age, which she later came to refer to as obliteration. Their enveloping presence in ‘The Obliteration Room’ recalls the artist’s infinity rooms, in which thousands of small lights flicker against mirrored walls, an example of which was presented during Kusama’s exhibition at David Zwirner in 2013, which attracted thousands of visitors to the gallery each day.

via designboom