YAYOI KUSAMA, THE ARTIST WHO TOOK THE WORLD TO INFINITY, DIES AT 97
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots, mirrored environments, pumpkins, and immersive installations transformed the visual language of contemporary art, died in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97. Her death from multiple organ failure was announced on August 27 in a joint statement from Yayoi Kusama Inc. and the artist’s studio.
Over a career spanning more than seven decades, Kusama moved between painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, fashion, poetry, and fiction. Her influence reached across minimalism, Pop art, performance art, and the rise of immersive experience, yet her work remained inseparable from an intensely personal visual world shaped by repetition, hallucination, and the idea of infinity.
Her final years were also among her most productive, profitable, and mysterious. While Kusama largely disappeared from public view, her studio continued to release paintings, sculptures, exhibitions, and luxury collaborations at an extraordinary pace. Questions surrounding her level of involvement during a period of declining health added a more complicated final chapter to the career of an artist whose image had become nearly as recognizable as her work.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations as a child—visions of flashing light, fields of dots, and patterns that appeared to consume her surroundings. Art became a way to translate those experiences and confront the fear they produced. Repeated marks, accumulating forms, mirrored reflections, flowers, pumpkins, orbs, and tentacle-like shapes developed into a vocabulary through which the boundaries between the self and the surrounding universe could dissolve.
Her parents operated a plant nursery, and the natural forms that surrounded her childhood would recur throughout her career. Pumpkins in particular became symbols of comfort, humor, and vitality, despite Kusama recalling that she had eaten so many during her youth that they once made her ill.
Kusama briefly studied traditional Nihonga painting at Kyoto City University of Arts in 1948 but found herself drawn toward the emerging language of abstraction. After corresponding with Georgia O’Keeffe, who encouraged her ambitions, she moved to New York in 1958.
Arriving in an art world overwhelmingly dominated by men, Kusama established herself through her large-scale “Infinity Nets” paintings—vast canvases covered in repetitive looping gestures—and her increasingly radical sculptural and performative practice. Donald Judd, who later became a close friend, reviewed her first New York solo exhibition in 1959 and described the work as original and conceptually advanced.
In 1962, Kusama began creating her “Accumulation” sculptures, covering furniture and everyday objects with repeated soft, phallic forms. Three years later, “Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field” debuted at Castellane Gallery, surrounding viewers with mirrored walls and an apparently endless expanse of red-spotted fabric sculptures. It introduced a format that would become central to her career: an enclosed environment in which the individual appears to multiply, fragment, and disappear into infinity.
Her work extended beyond the gallery. Throughout the 1960s, Kusama organized public happenings and body-painting performances that confronted sexual repression, war, institutional authority, and the conservative politics of the period. Her flamboyant public persona and talent for self-promotion made her a highly visible figure within New York’s counterculture, even as she struggled to gain the institutional recognition afforded to many of her male contemporaries.
In 1966, she staged “Narcissus Garden” without authorization at the Venice Biennale, installing 1,500 mirrored spheres outside the Italian Pavilion and attempting to sell them to visitors. The intervention challenged both the commodification of art and the Biennale establishment. Decades later, the work would be recreated at major cultural sites around the world.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977. She established a studio nearby and continued working while also writing poetry and novels. Although her international profile receded for a period, her commitment to her practice never did.
Mental illness was central to Kusama’s understanding of her art, but it did not fully define her. She transformed obsessive thoughts and hallucinations into a deliberate artistic system, using repetition as both subject and method. In one of her final public appearances, at the 2017 opening of the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, she said she continued to see polka dots everywhere and described art as the force for which she had struggled throughout her life.
A major reassessment of her career began with a 1989 retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York. In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale, presenting “Mirror Room (Pumpkin)” and reintroducing her mirrored installations to an international audience.
The 1998 exhibition “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968,” organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, placed her early work firmly within the histories of the postwar avant-garde. A 2011–2012 retrospective subsequently traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The touring exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” which opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in 2017, became a cultural phenomenon. Audiences waited for hours to spend seconds inside Kusama’s luminous mirrored environments, where reflected lights appeared to continue without end. The exhibition traveled to museums across North America, introducing millions of visitors to work that felt simultaneously psychological, cosmic, and tailor-made for the social media age.
That popularity occasionally threatened to overshadow the radical foundations of her practice. The “Infinity Mirror Rooms” became global selfie destinations, but their spectacle was rooted in a far more complex investigation of perception and disappearance. Kusama described this process as “self-obliteration”: the dissolution of individual identity into an endless field of repeated forms.
Her paintings remained equally essential. The intricate “Infinity Nets” she began in New York reflected an almost obsessive discipline; their hand-painted patterns extended across canvases without a clear beginning or end. In 2022, her 1959 painting “Untitled (Nets)” sold for $10.5 million, establishing an auction record for her work.
Kusama’s phenomenal late-career success also brought increasing commercialization. Her unmistakable dots and pumpkins appeared across fashion collections, merchandise, public commissions, and luxury products. A major 2023 partnership with Louis Vuitton placed her motifs on hundreds of garments, handbags, shoes, accessories, and objects—including a surfboard priced at $50,000 and a handbag exceeding $150,000. Animatronic versions of Kusama appeared in storefronts, while a colossal sculpture of the artist loomed over the brand’s Paris headquarters.
The collaboration demonstrated the extraordinary cultural reach of her visual identity, but it also prompted questions about authorship and oversight. By then Kusama’s health had declined, and she had reportedly stopped receiving most visitors in 2019. Although her studio continued producing works under her name, people close to the artist described her as increasingly isolated and largely bedridden during her final years.
The use of assistants and outside fabricators is standard within large-scale contemporary art practices. Kusama’s foundation maintained that she created the initial drawings and models for her sculptures, supervised their production, and approved the completed works. Still, the scale of the operation—and the artist’s limited public visibility—left some collectors and observers questioning precisely how much control she retained. According to her foundation, she continued making smaller paintings from her hospital room until July 2026, shortly before her death.
By the final decades of her life, Kusama had become one of the most recognizable artists in the world. Her exhibitions drew record attendance, her monumental sculptures occupied public spaces internationally, and her visual language entered fashion and popular culture. In 2016, she was included in “TIME” magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people.
Her presence in New York continued through projects including “KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature” at the New York Botanical Garden in 2021 and “A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe,” a permanent mosaic installed in Grand Central Madison in 2023. David Zwirner, which represented Kusama beginning in 2013, presented six solo exhibitions of her work in New York and is expected to exhibit a selection of her final works in April 2027.
Major institutional presentations continued until the end of her life. A European retrospective opened at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in 2025 before traveling to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where it became the most attended exhibition in the museum’s history. Its next presentation is scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on September 11, 2026.
Kusama continued creating through her final months, sustained by the conviction that art could give form to fear, isolation, desire, and hope. Yet the contradictions of her life remain part of the story: a deeply private artist who became a global celebrity, an anti-establishment provocateur whose work became a luxury empire, and a woman confined by illness who imagined worlds without boundaries.
“My entire life has been painted here,” she wrote. “Every day, any day.”
Kusama leaves behind a universe of her own making—brilliant, obsessive, immersive, commercially ubiquitous, and more complicated than its endlessly reflected surfaces might suggest.
Images courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio, David Zwirner, Wikimedia
