Yayoi Kusama: The Moving Moment When I Went to the Universe: Victoria Miro: London November 2018 8/10

Popular. All the free tickets have been snapped up. The visitors, while I’m waiting to get into the infinity Room, are all under thirty and all wedded to the idea of the group experience. I know this because when the invigilator appealed for a single person to make up the number to a group of four to enter the room I was the only person to sing out confidently and happily “I’m alone!”

You get about 30 seconds in the infinity room - not enough really, just enough time for one of the others to be scolded for using her phone with flash. Plus you are never alone, there is always an invigilator in view. On then to the pumpkin room.

I looked minutely at their dots, each pumpkin painting is unique - you might ask yourself why bother why not just print them out. I asked an invigilator why pumpkins and she said that the baby Kusama remembered her family growing pumpkins.

I do like the spotty-worm paintings, you get a sort of Bridget Riley shimmering in the valleys. I suppose that you can read these as flattened out pumpkins. Op art that’s the description of these and the paintings where the pumpkins’ dots have been liberated and roam free. 

The surface of these works seem to slightly flex as your gaze moves over the surface. Delicious.

I must say that I really enjoyed the pumpkin room. The 3D pumpkins are as perfect as any Jeff Koons production and presumably have the same market.

After the giant flowers that we saw in Matsumoto the flowers on show here seem rather domestic. However you can get close up to them which is a bonus.

A big climb to the third floor for a riot of Kusama's naive paintings. The names of the works are sweet e.g. "All About the Love that Never Ends and "I Spoke All About Peace", I salute her sentiments. Individually I find these pieces almost laughable but in a group they work.

The cleaner was about her daily grind!

The final question that I leave handing in the air is “whatever happened to Kusama's penises?”