The renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's latest major exhibition has opened at the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland, showcasing over 70 years of the artist's groundbreaking work. Visitors are greeted even before entering the museum by one of Kusama's most iconic installations, "Narcissus Garden," where hundreds of gleaming metallic spheres float among century-old trees and water lily ponds, creating a mesmerizing silver reflection across the water's surface.
The polished steel spheres, each measuring approximately 30 centimeters in diameter, drift gracefully with the wind and water currents. Their reflective surfaces capture everything around them – trees, sky, faces – until the boundaries of reality begin to dissolve. Like Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, visitors find themselves lost in their own reflections, captivated by the dizzying sense of infinity that permeates Kusama's work.
Once inside the exhibition space, the journey unfolds as a comprehensive exploration of Kusama's artistic evolution, featuring her signature polka dots, nets, and mirror installations. Through the infinite repetition of these forms, the artist explores the cycles of life and death, leading to what she describes as the dissolution of the self. Kusama, deeply inspired by nature, flowers, and organic cycles, transforms her personal obsessions into poetic rituals where each artwork emerges as a fragment of the cosmos, allowing individuals to fade away and merge with the universal whole.
Among the most beloved elements of the exhibition are Kusama's polka-dotted pumpkins, which appear throughout the space in various scales from monumental to miniature. These pumpkins serve as both fetish objects and personal talismans for the artist, their origins rooted in her childhood memories of rural Japan, where pumpkins represented comfort amid adversity. For Kusama, these sculptural forms have evolved into refuges and mirrors of the self, serving as protective talismans against fear and the dissolution of the world.
The exhibition's most striking feature consists of the Infinity Mirror Rooms, which invite visitors into immersive 360-degree environments. These installations use mirrors to multiply reflections infinitely, completely abolishing the boundaries between the human body and the universe. Visitors enter these spaces as if stepping into a suspended dream, where perception and emotion become indistinguishable from one another.
One particularly captivating room bathes visitors in brilliant yellow light against a backdrop of black polka dots, creating an atmosphere where light itself seems to vibrate with energy. Serpentine forms traverse the walls and floors, evoking organisms in constant movement that appear simultaneously animal and plant-like. At the center of this space, a room completely lined with mirrors absorbs visitors entirely, leaving only luminous columns that stretch and reflect infinitely, resembling breathing beings existing in a parallel dimension.
The experience transcends traditional art viewing, becoming almost magical in its intensity. Visitors no longer simply observe an artwork; instead, they become lost within it, disappear into it, and ultimately find themselves reborn through the encounter. The installation creates a transformative experience that challenges conventional relationships between viewer and artwork.
The materials throughout the exhibition engage in visual dialogue, with sculptures and paintings positioned to complement and extend each other in an enchanting continuous flow. This careful curation allows visitors to experience the full range of Kusama's artistic vocabulary, from her earliest works to her most recent creations, demonstrating the consistency and evolution of her unique visual language.
The Yayoi Kusama exhibition runs from October 12, 2025, through January 25, 2026, at the Beyeler Foundation located at Baselstrasse 77 in Riehen, Switzerland. The museum maintains varying hours throughout the week: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays; and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. General admission costs 30 Swiss francs (approximately $32).
