Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller

The legendary Yayoi Kusama traces the accumulations that characterize her works--such as dot motifs and the visceral patterns of paintings known as "Infinity Nets"--to the hallucinations that troubled her as a child. Born in Japan in 1929 to a conservative, well-to-do family and determined to be an artist, Kusama came to the U.S. in 1957 with a portfolio of drawings and little money. In the fall of 1959 she had her first solo exhibition in New York. The accumulation and dissolution of small, repeated images continue to dominate her work.

A gallery at Miller that faces the street was given over to two cubes (like most of the works on view, dated 2006), mirror-lined inside and out, each 31 1/2 inches square and resting on a Plexiglas pedestal that raised it to eye Level. Circular apertures in The Passing of Winter offered a view of infinitely compounded reflections of suspended disks. The optically spectacular Spirit of Early Spring revealed a superabundance of polished-steel balls endlessly reflected along with the viewer's face in a manner that recalled the high-resolution, digitally altered photographs of Lucas Samaras. The light sculpture Shooting Star, a 16-foot garland of holiday bulbs slung along the window wall, created a festive tunnel of color and light bouncing off facing sheets of mirror.

According to gallery sources, Kusama conveyed the installation's logistics by means of computer software. In a room darkened by velvet drapes she installed God's Heart (2005), a heart-shaped sculpture roughly 36 inches wide made up of a mirror and pulsing red LEDs hovering in the darkness. To the right was a 12-foot ladder, titled Ladder to Heaven, limned in fiber-optic cable and extended limitlessly by circular mirrors installed above and below the steel support; the light program shimmered through passages of white and yellow to green and blue. A series of "Infinity Nets" in acrylic on canvases slightly more than 76 inches on a side were realized in obsessive loops of hues that read as gold on darker grounds. A vast canvas some 32 feet long and 9 feet high in iridescent subtleties of a pearl-gray-lilac was flanked by a series of "Soaring Spirits," small clusters of stainless-steel balls on webbed armatures, also of stainless steel.

The exhibition featured Black Nerve as its centerpiece. It is an enormous, towering tangle of stuffed black linen tubes interconnected by tendrils of the same material and sprayed with iridescent glitter. Ranging around the surrounding walls was a series of 36 of Kusama's 4-by-5-foot, black-on-white silkscreen prints on canvas. Dated 2005 and 2006, they include landscape motifs and repeated faces that suggested the complicity of Australian dreamtime paintings and the amate paintings of Central America, except for their absence of a broader palette. Drawn by Kusama's legend as well as the enticing pieces in the gallery windows, an eager crowd paid homage to this remarkable artist.

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