A pleasant summer’s day in north London, though the environment around the north side of City Road is gritty, urban and uninviting, with a standard prefabricated drive-through McDonalds full of builders from the new residential blocks being built all around.  A long queue snakes up Wharf Road under the projecting balconies of the new developments, to reach a discrete door in an old warehouse facade.  People have apparently been queuing since 8 o’clock and the door opened an hour earlier than its normal time of 10am, yet the queue grows longer and longer.

It is the final week of Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition across Victoria Miro’s two venues at Wharf Road and also in Mayfair.

At over 80 years old, and arguably Japan’s best-known contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama has continually invented and reinvented her style, with her last major exhibition in London being at Tate Modern in 2012.   She has become something of a showman and the long queues are not here to see her paintings, but rather her mirrored-bronze pumpkin sculptures and three rooms, in which apparent infinity is created in relatively small wooden enclosures that can only house 2 or 4 people at a time, hence the resultant queues.   Light and mirrors are used to create infinite and immersive reflections of pumpkins, chandeliers and rays of light though it is a pity that the experience is, by necessity of popular demand, so short.

Outside in the garden 873 stainless steel spheres from 1966 float serenely on the canal waters, a permanent feature at the gallery, slowly changing their form as the water moves while reflecting the buildings, trees and skies around them.

Upstairs, in the top floor gallery, the room is filled with Kusama’s recent Infinity Net paintings, each exploring with one predominant colour her ongoing pre-occupation with dots, made into cloud-like patterns suggesting the infinity of the sky, while at Mayfair paintings from her ongoing series My Eternal Soul seem to focus on the essence of life, their earthy, naturalistic, almost aboriginal appearance a complete contrast to the light and glitter of the mirror rooms at Wharf Road.