“NARCISSUS GARDEN INHOTIM” (2009), BY YAYOI KUSAMA, IS ONE OF THE NEW PERMANENT INSTALLATIONS IN INHOTIM

“Narcissus Garden Inhotim” (2009) is a new version of Yayoi Kasuma’s key sculpture, originally exhibited in 1966 for the artist’s extra-official participation at the Venice Biennial. On that occasion, Kusama surreptitiously installed, on a lawn among the official pavilions, 1,500 mirrored balls that were sold to passers-by for two dollars a piece. The sign placed between the spheres – “Your narcissism for sale” – ironically reveals its critical message to the art system. Since then, the work has been repeatedly exhibited in important museums and urban spaces around the world. For the first time in Latin America, the work will be placed at the garden-terrace of Inhotim’s Burle Marx Educational Center, establishing a dialogue with both the landscape and the architecture of the building.

In this version, 500 stainless steel spheres float on the reflecting pool creating forms that dilute or condensate according to the wind or other external factors. By evoking the myth of Narcissus, who is dazzled by the reflection of his own image on the water, the work builds a large mirror, made of hundreds of convex mirrors, which distort, fragment and, above all, multiply the image of those who behold it. In her reading of the myth, Kusama deconstructs it as she affords an image-dispersing experience, which is refracted ad infinutum, unlike Narcissus’ illusion of unity and wholeness.

With a vocabulary ranging from painting to installation and with a wide array of relations with artistic movements, from minimalism to pop and feminist arts, Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre is unmistakable and extremely self-referential. Her obsession with circular patterns and phallic protrusions refers to the hallucinations the artist has endured since childhood, something she exorcises by compulsively applying this motif in her works.

Yayoi Kusama (Nagano, Japan, 1929; lives in Tokyo) moved to New York in 1957, becoming a part of the city’s intense artistic life at the time. Troubled by the psychiatric disorder that has assailed her since childhood, she returned to Japan in the early 1970s. Among her main, recent exhibitions, “The Mirrored Years”, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2008); “Eternity-Modernity”, at the National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, 2004-2005) and “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1969”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, are all worth mentioning. In 1993, Kusama returned to the Venice Biennial, only this time as Japan’s official representative.