Standing in a field of tightly packed red and white polka-dotted shrubs, I looked toward the horizon and saw more of the same. Ditto to the left, the right, behind. Above, the sky loomed hazy and overcast. Multiples of myself appeared, in even rows, extending into the farthest distance.
This extraordinary scene is entirely real and available for anyone to enter as part of “Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirschhorn Collection,” an exhibition currently on view at Wrightwood 659. It features a small selection of artworks by Mary Bauermeister, Niki de Saint Phalle and, most prominently, Yayoi Kusama, creator of that trippy installation of mirrors and small stuffed objects in which it sounds like I lost my head.
Kusama originally built “Phalli’s Field” in 1965, the very first of her “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” the immersive, psychedelic spaces for which she became world-famous starting in the early 2000s. The version I experienced at Wrightwood is a sublime 2017 remake. A second installation of hers from 2018 accompanies it, “My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe,” a little less unsettling and a lot more cosmic disco, dark and full of polka-dotted lanterns that change color as they reflect into the far reaches of the universe. Nearby sits an 8-foot-tall sculpture of a pumpkin, pale orange and decorated with a mesmerizing pattern of black spots.
The mythology of Kusama, who died in August at the age of 97, can be hard to escape. Stories of her very real mental illness, her visions of dots and nets filling the world around her and obliterating her sense of self, dominate nearly every narrative about her artwork, as does her late-in-life celebrityhood, her collaborations with Louis Vuitton, and the lines that inevitably form outside of her constructed environments, as hordes of people wait to have their turn and take their selfie. Approaching her work unjaded is not easy. But it helped to keep my camera off and limit myself to just simply being in these two uncanny places of Kusama’s strange design. They may resemble sites fashioned for cool image-making, but that is their lowest possible usage — better to have your mind expanded.
Also helpful, for better and for worse, are the limitations of the exhibition itself, which provides scant didactics and only a handful of artworks in total. Unless you already know about Kusama and her oeuvre, you’re mostly just left with a trio of her monumental artworks to encounter firsthand. That’s rare and exciting. It’s also entirely doable, given the easy immediacy of the situations they engulf the viewer in. All anyone really has to do is be present, observant — and patient. Visits into each space are timed and extremely short, but repeat viewing is allowed for anyone willing to wait in line all over again.
The unexpected addition of Bauermeister and Saint Phalle to the roster provides a refreshing context. The trio has never been shown together before. The convergence elucidates all three, who, it turns out, share resonances both biographical and artistic. Born in different parts of the globe within a few years of one another — Kusama in Japan in 1929, Saint Phalle in France in 1930, Bauermeister in Germany in 1934 — they each spent formative periods in New York City, chafed against conservative expectations, especially for women, and were propelled by passionate inner conviction. Each found herself at the center of avant-garde art movements that celebrated the intermingling of art and life, and each eventually ended up forging her own wild, idiosyncratic path along the fringes of recognized art practices.
Art-wise, Kusama covered everything she could get her hands on — canvases, furniture, clothing, even live people — with simple bold shapes that reach toward infinity. Bauermeister assembled thousands of concentric stones, pointillist drawings and text, glass lenses and painted wood spheres into dense, spellbinding tableaus housed in shallow boxes. Saint Phalle drew, collaged and sculpted “Nanas,” ecstatic females whose voluptuous bodies were capacious enough to contain patterns and airplanes, housing and death. All three began to work in these ways in the 1960s, and each continued to produce these core forms until the end of her life (Bauermeister died in 2023, Saint Phalle in 2002).
None of their artmaking looks anything alike, at least on the surface. But rebellious life force drives all of it, expressed via repetitive patterning, excessiveness, experiments with perception, and a need to create order out of chaos. These qualities are fundamental to all three artists’ oeuvres, highlighted by the very good idea of exhibiting their work together.
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Unfortunately, this is mostly just a good idea. The promised illumination only just barely flickers, due to the minuscule number of artworks included in “Inner Worlds,” and the equally meager information provided. No doubt transporting and installing Kusama’s enormous projects requires substantial resources, but the same cannot be said for Bauermeister’s three little assemblages or Saint Phalle’s pair of modest prints and a midsize collage. Why so sparse?
The permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national institute of modern and contemporary art to which everything in the exhibit belongs, contains a handful of additional works by each of these artists; a more generous presentation ought to have been a no-brainer. (Extras could even have been borrowed from the AIC and the MCA, which between them own a few others.) Likewise, Wrightwood has plenty of gallery space available; as it stands, the show feels practically empty, full of unadorned walls, especially in the area blocked off for those inevitable Kusama queues. Why not fill the waiting area and make the best of that downtime? Why not take the opportunity to pull some supplementary Bauermeisters and Saint Phalles out of storage?
All three artists reveled in excess. Giving them such a minimal display feels spiritually wrong.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
If you go
“Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection” runs through Dec. 19 at Wrightwood 659, 659 Wrightwood Ave., 773-437-6601, wrightwood659.org
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