Exceptional Works: Yayoi Kusama

Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has been integral in shaping the landscape of international contemporary art and is widely acclaimed as one of the most successful artists in the world. Unmistakable and endlessly inventive, her groundbreaking body of work—which comprises painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and installation—traverses a range of postwar artistic movements while consistently engaging such universal themes as subjectivity, life, death, infinity, and obsession.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, DOTS OBSESSION - INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM (2008/2018) is a striking example of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. These unique spatial environments use repetition as a means to convey a poetic experience of endlessness.

DOTS OBSESSION - INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM features large, suspended vinyl globes and an inflatable dome with a mirror room, creating multiple nested environments. The interior of the dome is paneled with mirrors and yellow, polka-dotted lamps that hang above the viewer.

The work also includes a smaller “peep-in” mirror room, which invites the viewer to look inside one of the balloons through a designated peephole. Within the self-contained interior, a series of polka-dotted orbs reflected in the mirrored space create a pattern constantly in flux. The myriad reflections afforded by the mirrors eradicate a sense of a fixed perspective and offer an impression of a seemingly infinite universe.

These environments embody the main principles of Kusama's long-running practice. While Infinity Mirror Rooms have appeared in her work since the 1960s, they gained increasing centrality in the mid-2000s and have drawn record-breaking attendances to shows that include such installations. The multiple mirrors invite glimpses into parallel worlds, just as the artist's Infinity Nets can be seen to push painting to its spatial extents. Likewise, the repetitive light cycles echo the history of obsession within her work, which derives from her desire for art that is at once autobiographical and seemingly created outside of the confines of the self.