Yet Another Yayoi Kusama Show Has Been Postponed
The fourth exhibition cancellation for the artist since lockdowns began.
Yayoi Kusama has had another exhibition postponed as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns. The artist’s widely-anticipated retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin, which had been slated to open in September, has now been delayed until March 2021.
This is the fourth exhibition of the artist’s that has been cancelled or delayed this year: in March, Washington DC’s Hirshorn Museum indefinitely postponed the upcoming immersive show One With Eternity. In London, the Tate Modern has delayed the opening of the Infinity Mirror Rooms — which had been due to launch in May — until Spring 2021, while an upcoming outdoor show in the 250-acre New York Botanical Garden has also been pushed back.
The Gropius Bau show was set to be the most comprehensive overview of the 91 year-old Japanese artist’s work, bringing together works that span the breadth of her career – from her beginnings in Japan in the 1950s to the large-scale (and Instagram-baiting) installations that have appeared in cities all over the world.
In April, Kusama released a poem addressing the COVID-19 pandemic via the Victoria Miro gallery, writing “To COVID-19 that stands in our way / I say Disappear from this earth /We shall fight / We shall fight this terrible monster.”
Though the pandemic continues to play havoc with exhibition programming, it seems to have left the world’s richest art dealers largely unaffected.
