Yayoi Kusama, known for her crowd-drawing paintings, sculptures and installations featuring mirrors and polka dots, died on 14 August aged 97, her gallery David Zwirner has announced.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929 and moved to Kyoto in 1948 to study art. In the 1950s, she burned around 2,000 paintings, most of her work, to make space for ‘a new world of art’ before moving to New York. There, she started developing her paintings now known as Infinity Nets, composed of small white loops repeated across monochrome backgrounds. Throughout the 1960s, she expanded her practice through sculptural Accumulations, furniture covered with phallic fabric sculptures; installations, with the first iteration of her Infinity Mirrored Room exhibited at Richard Castellane Gallery in 1966; and performance, including her Body Festivals, Self-Obliteration and ‘orgy’ pieces where polka dots were painted on naked performers.
Kusama spoke frequently of how mental illness influenced her practice, describing hallucinations and obsessions that drove her to cover her environment in patterns. In the early 1970s she returned to Japan and checked herself in to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentality Ill in Tokyo in 1977 where she lived until the end of her life. She continued to make work in her nearby studio and to enjoy widespread recognition. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a mirrored infinity room filled with pumpkin sculptures. The following year, a largescale dotted Yellow Pumpkin was installed on the island of Naoshima, becoming a much-loved tourist destination.
In the twenty-first century, Kusama’s fame rose to new heights, with her retrospective exhibitions and Infinity Mirror Room installations often drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors in museums across the globe. Her polka dots and pumpkin motifs also found new audiences via brand partnerships, including most notoriously with Louis Vuitton that controversially used a robot likeness of the artist in its store windows to promote its polka dotted Kusama collection in 2023.
When asked about her international fame and the influence she had on others, Kusama was pleased but unfazed. “I am I. Others are others”, she told ArtReview in 2007. “My greatest aspiration in life is to discover myself and create artwork.”
