Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97. Her studio announced on 26 August 2026 that she died on 14 August at a hospital in Tokyo, and did not give a cause. For more than seven decades she built a single, unmistakable world from polka dots, nets, mirrors and pumpkins, and that world moved from the margins of 1960s New York to the centre of contemporary art.
A life in dates
Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, into a family that ran a seed nursery. She studied Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, in Kyoto before breaking with its conventions. In 1957 she left Japan for the United States and settled in New York in 1958, where she worked alongside figures of the avant-garde and early pop art.
The chronology matters because it explains the scale of what followed. New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s gave her proximity to minimalism, pop and performance at the same moment. She exhibited with artists who would become canonical, and her work was discussed in the same pages as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, not as a derivative of them but as a parallel language of repetition.
Hallucination as method
Kusama spoke openly, from her earliest interviews, about visual and auditory hallucinations that began in childhood. Fields, flowers and furniture appeared to her covered in dense nets and dots. Rather than treating the experience as an interruption to work, she made it the work.
The first sustained statement of that method was the Infinity Net paintings, begun in New York. A single, small brushstroke repeated across a large canvas until the surface appears to vibrate. The paintings are not about infinity as an idea. They are a record of a hand trying to keep up with a field that will not stop.
From nets she moved to objects, then to rooms. Sculptures covered in soft, phallic protrusions. Dresses and furniture multiplied into fields. The decisive step was the mirror room. In an Infinity Mirror Room, mirrored walls, a shallow pool of water and a sparse arrangement of lights create an optical field without an edge. The viewer stands inside the repetition rather than in front of it. The effect is simple to describe and difficult to forget.
New York in the 1960s
Between 1960 and 1968 Kusama worked across painting, sculpture, film, fashion and performance. She staged happenings and anti-war actions in public space, often with bodies painted in polka dots. The actions were not separate from the studio work. They extended the same logic: if a surface can be covered, so can a body, a street, a city.
Critics at the time compared her strategies to Warhol’s seriality and Oldenburg’s soft sculpture, and the comparisons were not unfounded. All three artists used repetition and the everyday object. Kusama’s difference was the insistence that repetition was not a cool industrial procedure but a lived, even physiological condition.
Return to Japan
In 1973 she returned to Japan. In 1977 she took the decision that would shape the second half of her life and, in many accounts, make the work possible at its later scale. She moved into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo and lived there for the rest of her life, walking each day to a nearby studio to work. She described the hospital as a place that allowed her to confront herself and keep working, not as a retreat from it.
Late recognition
The long period without large institutional support in Japan ended in the 1990s. Retrospectives followed in Europe, the United States and Asia. Museums that had once shown her as part of a historical survey began to give her solo exhibitions at scale.
The pumpkin became the most public sign of that recognition. A form she first drew as a child in Matsumoto returned as monumental outdoor sculpture, often in fibreglass or bronze, its surface covered in a net of black dots on yellow or the inverse. The works are sited in front of museums, on islands, in parks. They are immediately legible and, in the best cases, slightly unsettling, as if a biological form had been gently corrected by geometry.
She worked in other fields throughout: novels, poetry, fashion collections, collaborations with designers including Louis Vuitton, whose 2012 and 2023 collections remade her dots and pumpkins at industrial scale. In 2016 she received the Order of Culture, one of Japan’s highest honours for contribution to the arts.
What the work is about
It is easy to describe Kusama through biography, and the biography is extraordinary. It is more useful to describe what the work asks a viewer to do.
An Infinity Net asks for close looking that becomes almost physical. The eye cannot rest. An Infinity Mirror Room asks for a decision about where you are. The room has no corners to measure yourself against, and the lights appear to recede beyond the building. A pumpkin asks for a different kind of attention, the pleasure of a single form that has been repeated until it becomes both familiar and strange.
In each case the method is the same. A limited vocabulary of dot, net, sphere and mirror, repeated until quantity becomes atmosphere. The work does not illustrate hallucination. It gives a viewer, for a few minutes, a version of the conditions under which it was made.
The studio until the end
Kusama painted daily into her final years. Her studio released new paintings each year, often in series that extended the My Eternal Soul cycle begun in 2009, and she continued to plan installations. The hospital and studio routine became part of how the work was understood, not as myth but as structure: a fixed place to live, a short walk to work, a set of materials that could be returned to without negotiation.
In its announcement the studio said she “continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul”. The language is hers, and it has been consistent since the 1950s.
Where to see the work
The travelling European retrospective organised with the artist and her studio has one venue still to come. It opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, near Basel, in October 2025 and closed there in January 2026; it was shown at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne until 2 August 2026; and it opens at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on 11 September 2026, running to 17 January 2027. The exhibition covers more than seven decades and includes early works not previously shown in Europe, new paintings and an Infinity Mirror Room.
Long-term installations remain on view elsewhere, among them the pumpkin at the National Art Center in Tokyo and the works on Naoshima. For readers in the United Kingdom, the most recent large-scale presentation was at Tate Modern.
Photograph: Yayoi Kusama, still from “art is (Speaking Portraits)” by George Quasha, filmed circa 2002 to 2005. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
