Hettie Judah reviews Yayoi Kusama in iNews

…everything in I Want Your Tears to Flow with the Words I Wrote at Victoria Miro is from the last two years. Three walls of the lower gallery are lined with grids of paintings from her series My Eternal Soul (2009-). Each a neat metre square, they are filled with abstract forms that recall shapes produced during hallucinogenic visions: dots, spirals, zigzags, apertures and simple faces.

In some, Kusama uses intense complementary colours, such as bright red and blue to produce an illusion of jarring movement. Others are built up in densely patterned lines of a single colour against a white or black ground.

They carry extravagant, often melancholy names like I Who Concealed Myself in the Doorway of Deepest Sorrow or When I woke after Midnight to a worried Mind. Without the distraction of a mirror, it is arguably easier to loose yourself in these walls of pulsing shapes than in the infinity rooms. Low plinths on the floor carry a series of soft flaming forms – Desire for Death – warning us perhaps not to see all this as a jolly circus of captivating colour.

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Image: Yayoi Kusama, An Offering From My Heart to Michelle Obama, 2020