Yayoi Kusama’s installation ‘Narcissus Garden” exhibited at the Glass House

The Glass House presents Yayoi Kusama: Narcissus Garden, a landscape installation that will be on view throughout the 2016 tour season to celebrate the 110th anniversary of Philip Johnson’s birth and the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Glass House site to the public. First created fifty years ago in 1966 for the 33rd Venice Biennale, this iteration of Narcissus Garden has been incorporated into the Glass House’s 49-acre landscape.

Narcissus Garden, comprising 1,300 floating steel spheres, each approximately 12 inches in diameter (30 cm) has been installed in the Lower Meadow and forest, creating a dramatic view to the west of the Glass House. Drifting in the newly restored pond, the spheres move with the wind and follow the pond’s natural currents, forming a kinetic sculpture. Their mirrored surfaces reflect the surrounding Pond Pavilion (1962), wooded landscape, and sky.

The Glass House also installed Kusama’s recently created enormous steel PUMPKIN (2015). The placement of PUMPKIN is on the hillside meadow, east-northeast of the Brick House (1949), on a concrete sculpture footing where Ellsworth Kelly’s Curve II (1973) was once installed. “The first time I saw a pumpkin was in a farm in elementary school. In Japanese, a ‘pumpkin head’ is an ignorant man or a pudgy woman, but for me, I am charmed by its shape, form, and lack of pretension.” says the artist.

First created out of silver-colored plastic, Narcissus Garden was both a sculpture on display and a piece of performance art, as the artist sold the spheres to visitors for $2 each. Staked into the lawn were two signs stating: “NARCISSUS GARDEN, KUSAMA” and “YOUR NARCISSIUM FOR SALE.”

Versions of the sculpture have been included in traveling museum solo exhibitions as well as important international group exhibitions, including the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2002); Whitney Biennial in Central Park, New York (2004); and Louvre’s Sculpture Programme for FIAC in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris (2010); among others. The work has also been exhibited in institutions and historic residences, such as the Burle Marx Education and Cultural Center at the Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil (2009) and the Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England (2009).

 

 

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