Australia is seeing spots after the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)’s Yayoi Kusama blockbuster became the most-visited ticketed art exhibition in the nation’s history.
The Melbourne-based NGV has reported that 570,537 tickets were sold for the summer exhibition, which was titled Yayoi Kusama. This broke the institution’s own record of 462,262 tickets sold for the gallery’s 2017 exhibition Van Gogh and the Seasons. It is, the NGV has announced, the highest attendance record for a visual art exhibition held in Australia; popular archaeological shows such as the Melbourne Museum’s Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, for which 796,277 tickets were sold, were not considered within the calculations.
Daily average visitation figures tell a slightly different story to straight ticket sales, showing Van Gogh ahead of Kusama on that measure.
Kusama ran for 127 days with an average of 4,492 daily visitors. Van Gogh and the Seasons ran for 76 days with an average of 6,082 daily visitors.
Yayoi Kusama was open between 15 December 2024 and 21 April 2025. It covered almost nine decades of the reclusive Japanese artist’s career, featuring 200 artworks.
Visitors at Yayoi Kusama exhibition
Photo: Tom Ross
The earliest works on view were drawings Kusama did as a nine-year-old, while the latest one was an “infinity room” made last year. Kusama’s infinity rooms are installations which use mirrors to create the illusion of infinite space. The NGV exhibition featured 10 infinity rooms.
In a statement, the NGV said Yayoi Kusama was the largest exhibition it had ever dedicated to a single living artist. The display was so comprehensive it even spilled out of the gallery confines and into St Kilda Road, where the street trees were wrapped in pink and white polka dots.
Polka dots are a recurring motif in Kusama’s work, evoking infinity and never-ending connectedness.
Kusama has also credited the dots with relieving the pain of the psychiatric condition that was triggered when her mother forced her to spy on her father with his lovers.
Among visitors to Yayoi Kusama at the NGV were pop stars Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Troye Sivan and Finneas.
The NGV acquired two major works from the show. They are the five-metre tall sculpture Dancing Pumpkin (2020) and Narcissus Garden (1966/2024), an installation of 1,400 glimmering silver balls.
Dancing Pumpkin was acquired with the support of the Loti and Victor Smorgon Fund, while the purchase of Narcissus Garden was enabled by the NGV’s annual appeal which invites philanthropic contributions from the community.
The next major exhibition at the NGV will be French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opening on June 6. This exhibition opened briefly at the NGV in 2021, but the Covid-19 pandemic quickly forced its closure.
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