Each painting was made in a single session, a modus operandi that gives the whole experience a significant temporal frame while at the same time casting some doubt about their effective relevance. Kusama is, after all, an artist who has developed an immediately recognizable visual language. No matter how beneficial, this often has the unwanted effect of redirecting the work into mannerism or design. This is not the case here, as a first glance at these new paintings is sufficient to confirm. Stunningly fresh and vibrant, they combine familiar grids of colors and forms with an instinctive and personal approach to painting. Even when defined by geometrical precision and chromatic harmony, the gentle indecision of brushstrokes suggests an innate honesty and an overall feeling of vulnerability. This sense is borne out by titles like Standing on the Riverbank of My Hometown I Shed Tears (2009) and Love, Birth and Death, and Illness and What is Happiness? (2009). If distinctions between abstract and realist or internal and external look blurred, it is because these paintings don’t seem to follow any particular logic. Kusama has spent most of her life in a dark place, and one of the main issues emerging from her retrospective at Tate is the gap between her early, less-known work and the gregarious, playful installations and flashy polka dots paintings she is now universally acknowledged for — two apparently diverging aspects that the exhibition at Victoria Miro successfully reconciles.