Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots, pumpkins and mirrored installations became a global visual language, has died aged 97. Her studio said she died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, having continued to paint until her final days.
Few artists made repetition feel so alive. Across painting, sculpture, performance, fashion and installation, Kusama turned dots, nets and reflected light into worlds that seemed to expand without end. Her work was immediately joyful and visually seductive, but it also came from a deeply personal creative practice shaped by her lifelong experiences of anxiety, fear and hallucinations.
Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama arrived in New York in 1958 and quickly became a radical presence in the city’s avant-garde scene. Her Infinity Nets paintings—built from thousands of repeated hand-painted loops—transformed obsessive repetition into something meditative and vast.
In 1965, she created Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, the first of more than 20 mirror-room installations that would make the viewer feel both central to, and almost lost within, an endless field of reflections.
Her pumpkins became just as beloved. Rounded, dotted and often monumental, they offered warmth and humour alongside the disorienting scale of her mirror rooms. In a Kusama work, the domestic, the surreal and the cosmic often coexist: a simple pumpkin becomes an icon; a dot becomes a universe.
“I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art,” she once said. Kusama did not hide the difficult experiences behind her work. She made them visible, transforming private sensations into generous, immersive encounters for millions of viewers.
Her legacy reaches far beyond the museum queue or the photographed glow of an Infinity Mirror Room. Kusama gave contemporary art a language that was direct, playful and emotionally fearless—reminding us that even the smallest mark can become limitless when repeated with conviction.
Photo courtesy of Yayoi Kusama
