Endless possibility

Acclaimed Japanese artist’s study of infinity — and beyond — on full, eye-popping display in CMA’s ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors’

It feels like a fool’s errand.¶ Perhaps it’s merely a cop-out, but the idea of trying to describe “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” — a highly anticipated major new exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art — in a way that’s both concise and meaningful is too daunting.

Walking through the show when CMA unveiled to the media and some VIPs on July 7 was borderline-dizzying, the wide breadth of the acclaimed Japanese artist’s 65-year career on full display and demanding attention.

Guests will encounter everything from early drawings to unusual sculptures to Kusama’s famed Infinity Mirrors, for which the exhibition is named.

And, boy, those senseconfusing Infinity Mirror Rooms are something.

“At this point, I think it’s certainly fair to say she’s one of the most important living artists,” said Reto Thüring, CMA’s curator of contemporary art, at the opening. “She’s really had a presence in the art world for more than five decades.”

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, according to background information provided by the museum, Kusama moved to this country in 1957. She lived for years in New York, where she worked among the city’s avant-garde community.

She began to work with mirrors in 1965, and the idea of infinity would become prevalent in much of her work through the years. She returned to Japan in 1973 and has continued to create since.

Thüring says Kusama hasn’t been able to travel

in many years and thus has never seen an incarnation of this show, organized by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and debuting in that Washington, D.C. venue in February 2017. Cleveland is the show’s fifth of six stops.

CATHY CARVER “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity” is one of the dazzling Infinity Mirror Rooms on display in “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

TOMOAKI MAKINO Influential Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is photographed with some of her works in Tokyo in 2016. Some of, not all of, these pieces are on display in “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Cleveland Museum of Art.