Artist Yayoi Kusama Dots the New York Botanical Gardens with Site-Specific Installations

Artist Yayoi Kusama’s surreal, fantastical works of art engage in a dialogue with its natural surroundings at the New York Botanical Gardens. The exhibition is open for viewing till October 2021

Called Kusama: Cosmic Nature, this exhibition features 60 works by the nonagenarian artist. Curated by Mika Yoshitake, the exhibition, a mix of Kusama’s large-scale, fantastical works, is pure joy. You come across monumental floral sculptures, trees wrapped in polka dots, mirrored spheres, and squiggly sculptures, Kusama’s multifaceted art transform the NYBG’s 250-acre landscape into a world of fantasy. It’s almost like a treasure hunt, in your imaginary world; where all your imaginations have acquired mammoth proportions. A giant polka-dotted pumpkin is perched on squiggly legs called The Dancing Pumpkin stands in perfect symphony with its surroundings.

The artist’s legendary Narcissus Garden installed in a channel of water in the Native Plant Garden comprises 1400 stainless steel spheres, drifting slowly with the wind and water, bumping into each other as it does, sparkling and mirroring its surroundings.

The exhibition is a testimony to Kusama’s lifelong fascination with the natural world, beginning with her childhood spent in the greenhouses and fields of her family’s seed nursery. Her artistic concepts of obliteration, infinity, and eternity are inspired by her intimate engagement with the colours, patterns, and life cycles of plants and flowers.