Page 26 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

WORLD-CLASS ART

Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrored Room — A Wish for Human Happiness Calling Mark Rothko. Untitled, 1952–53, Oil on canvas 299,5 x 442,5 cm. Guggenheim
from Beyond the Universe, 2020 Mirrored glass, wood, LED lighting system, Bilbao Museoa. © Kate Rothko Prizel y Christophe Rothko, Bilbao, 2022
metal, acrylic panel. Ed. Nr.: 1/5. 293.7 × 417 × 417 cm. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts
©YAYOI KUSAMA, Bilbao, 2022

YAYOI KUSAMA – FIRST FLOOR, ROOM 103 UNFOLDING NARRATIVES – SECOND FLOOR
Through a long-term loan to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Narrative works often illustrate religious, legendary, historical,
the exhibition includes a work by the Japanese artist and abstract, representative, or mythological events that yield
writer Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, Nagano, 1929). A leading different layers of meaning, resorting to individual experience
and pioneering figure in contemporary art, Kusama envisages as a means for transmitting shared stories, whether real
art as a means of social change, and to this end makes use of or fictitious. Sometimes the narrative is articulated around
performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, literature, and her subjects and characters, sometimes it is based on everyday
celebrated immersive installations, the Infinity Mirror Rooms. objects and materials that are redolent with cultural
With Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness associations, and occasionally it has its origin in fictions
Calling from Beyond the Universe (2020), one of the last works that activate the viewer’s imagination in order to complete
produced by the artist, Kusama draws us into an immersive or question it. This type of commitment and reinvention
experience. The space projects Kusama’s hallucinations of narrative forms by contemporary artists arises from a
and the need for “self-obliteration”, making viewers into resistance to grand narratives , a term coined in 1979 by the
participants in her obsessive universe by inviting them also to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who explained how
disappear in the vibrant interplay of colored lights that multiply discourses, and with them experience and knowledge, were
limitlessly on the mirrored walls of an infinite room. presented in a totalizing fashion as absolute truths. With his
resilient and to some extent emancipatory critique, Lyotard
suggested focusing on micronarratives, or ‘petits récits ’,
Cristina Iglesias. Untitled (Jealousy II) [Sin título (Celosía II)], 1997. Wood, resin,
and bronze powder 260 x 350 x 300 cm. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. © Cristina whose representations are based on the fragmentary nature
Iglesias, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Bilbao, 2022 of cultural multiplicity and personal perspective. Artists in our
contemporary society adopt this new perspective, amplifying
and transforming the visual and poetic potential of narrativity,
and so weaving their own stories and expanding traditional
narrative in a localized way. On this premise, the second floor
brings together pieces by twenty artists produced between
1957 and 2019 in media like painting, sculpture, photography,
work on paper, and installation. They offer an expansive vision
of narrative paradigms stemming from various movements of
the second half of the 20th century. The rooms of Unfolding
Narratives are thus presented as chapters through a coherent
selection of works that run through many timeframes,
movements, and thematically grouped styles. These chapters

24 WORLD of ART