Museum Ludwig Opens Kusama Exhibition for 50th Anniversary

COLOGNE, Germany — The Museum Ludwig marked its 50th anniversary on Saturday with the opening of a major exhibition featuring more than 300 works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, spanning eight decades of her career and drawing visitors to the institution's location at the base of the city's iconic cathedral.

The show, which runs through August 2, traces Kusama's evolution from her earliest drawings in the mid-1930s to a newly commissioned Infinity Mirror Room created specifically for the display. At 96, Kusama has gained widespread popularity on social media for her vibrant polka dots, bold colors and organic forms that convey a profound sense of wonder about existence. Curator Stephan Diederich described the exhibition as "very diverse, wide-ranging, and depicting an immensely rich, creative life spanning more than eight decades, still looking ahead."

Visitors enter through a prominent installation of Kusama's 2009 Pumpkin, a fiber-reinforced plastic sculpture coated in polyurethane paint and on loan from the Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands. Inside, highlights include a mirror room scattered with colored dots, rooftop displays of contorted bronze flower sculptures such as...