Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka-dot paintings and immersive infinity mirror rooms made her a global superstar, died aged 97 in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August. Her studio announced her death in a statement published on its website on Thursday.
A career built around infinity and self-obliteration
Kusama developed the themes that would define her work as a young artist in the 1960s, creating vast “infinity net” paintings and sculptures covered in repeated forms. At the 1966 Venice Biennale, she presented Narcissus Garden, a lake of 1,500 reflective balls; the event moved to stop her after she began selling them for $2 each under the banner “Your narcissism for sale”.
Her practice also included performance, fiction and poetry. In 1968, she staged a same-sex wedding in New York’s Tribeca and protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia by washing a Soviet flag outside the United Nations. She also held performances featuring naked participants painted with polka dots.
From obscurity to international recognition
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama moved to New York in 1958 after studying nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style, in Kyoto. She sold her first infinity-net painting to Frank Stella and Donald Judd in 1962 for $75. Her White No 28 sold for $7.1m at auction in 2014, then a record for a living female artist.
Kusama returned to Japan after years in the United States and permanently entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977. She worked each day at a nearby studio, while continuing to make art and publish novels. Wider recognition followed her 1993 presentation of a mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures at the Venice Biennale’s Japanese pavilion.
Her later installations, including mirrored rooms with coloured lights and pumpkins, drew audiences around the world and became especially popular as settings for social-media photographs. Her work was the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, Tate Modern in London in 2012 and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2017.
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