Yayoi Kusama — Festival of Life + Infinity Nets — Exhibition Announcement Card, David Zwirner, New York, 2017

Exhibition announcement card
Approx. 21 × 14.8 cm
Offset print on card stock; colour studio portrait to recto, exhibition details to verso
Published by David Zwirner, New York
Exhibition dates: 2 November – 16 December 2017
Condition: very good; light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with age and storage

Issued for a significant concurrent two-part exhibition by Yayoi Kusama in New York in late 2017. The invitation announced two simultaneous presentations across separate David Zwirner locations: Festival of Life in Chelsea and Infinity Nets on the Upper East Side.

Festival of Life brought together sixty-six paintings from Kusama’s My Eternal Soul series alongside immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms and large-scale sculptural works. Running in parallel, Infinity Nets returned to one of the artist’s foundational bodies of work: monochromatic paintings built through repeated hand-painted gestures accumulating into dense optical fields.

The image reproduced on the front departs from a conventional artwork reproduction and instead presents Kusama inside the environment of her own production. Seated in the studio, surrounded by My Eternal Soul paintings, the distinction between artist, setting, and work begins to collapse. The red wig, patterned dress, and surrounding surfaces seem to operate within the same visual system. Portrait becomes installation; installation becomes self-image.

Across Kusama’s practice, repetition acts simultaneously as method, psychological structure, and image-making device. Dots, nets, accumulations, and mirrored spaces continuously oscillate between personal compulsion and visual infinity. Rather than depicting a world, the work creates one.

As an object, the card retains a moment when two major trajectories of Kusama’s practice — recent maximalism and foundational repetition — were presented in parallel. A small printed support carrying the structure of a much larger environment.

Original period item. Shipping and handling included in listed price.