Yayoi Kusama’s art is instantly recognisable. Polka dots proliferate across paintings, sculptures and installations; pumpkins appear in vivid yellow and black; mirrors dissolve physical boundaries into seemingly endless spaces. Yet beneath the visual exuberance lies a deeply personal artistic practice, shaped by repetition, infinity, nature and the desire to transcend the limits of the individual self.
Kusama, who died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97, leaves behind one of the most distinctive and widely recognised bodies of work of the modern and contemporary era, with more information available from the Yayoi Kusama Museum and Yayoi Kusama's website. Her career, spanning more than seven decades, encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, fashion, poetry and fiction.
From Matsumoto to New York: The Making of Yayoi Kusama
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama developed an interest in art from childhood. She experienced vivid visual and auditory hallucinations from a young age, and these visions would become an important source for the recurring patterns and motifs that defined her later work. Her family owned a plant nursery, fostering an early fascination with flowers, seeds and the natural world.
Kusama studied traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto but soon found herself drawn towards more experimental forms of expression. In the 1950s, she began producing increasingly abstract paintings and works on paper, developing the obsessive repetition that would become central to her practice.
In 1957, Kusama left Japan for the United States, arriving in New York at a pivotal moment in the development of post-war American art. There, she produced her celebrated Infinity Net paintings: vast canvases covered with thousands of meticulously repeated loops. The paintings were at once meditative and overwhelming, their seemingly endless surfaces suggesting an infinite expanse beyond the boundaries of the canvas.
Kusama quickly became an important presence within New York’s avant-garde. Her practice extended beyond painting into sculpture, installation and performance, while her work intersected with the emerging languages of Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual art.
Polka Dots, Pumpkins and the Idea of Infinity
Repetition remained at the heart of Kusama’s artistic vocabulary. Her famous polka dots, or dots obsession, became more than a decorative motif: they represented a means of dissolving the individual into a larger universe. By covering objects, walls and environments with repeated dots, Kusama transformed the familiar into something otherworldly.
Her pumpkins occupy a similarly important place within her visual language. The motif can be traced back to drawings from the late 1940s and was inspired, in part, by her childhood encounters with the vegetable while visiting a seed-harvesting farm. Rendered in luminous colours and covered in her characteristic dots, the pumpkin became both an instantly recognisable image and a symbol of Kusama’s connection to nature.
Perhaps her most celebrated contribution, however, is the Infinity Mirror Room. First conceived in New York in 1965 with Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, Kusama used mirrors to multiply repeated forms and transform them into an immersive environment.
The effect was revolutionary: instead of simply looking at a work of art, the viewer entered it. Reflections seemed to extend indefinitely, creating an experience that was simultaneously intimate and cosmic. Over the course of her career, Kusama created more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms, exploring ideas of perception, space, life and mortality.
A Life Devoted to Art
Kusama’s career was remarkable not only for its originality but for its persistence. After returning to Japan in 1973, she continued to work across painting, sculpture, installation and literature, developing the monumental and immersive works for which she would later become internationally celebrated.
Her recognition grew steadily from the late twentieth century onwards, with major exhibitions bringing her work to increasingly large audiences. In 1993, she became the first woman to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, a significant moment in the international recognition of her work.
Kusama’s influence also extended well beyond the traditional boundaries of the gallery. Her distinctive visual language entered fashion, design and popular culture, most notably through her collaborations with Louis Vuitton. Yet the enduring fascination with her work lies in the fact that its extraordinary visual appeal is inseparable from deeply personal ideas of repetition, infinity and self-obliteration.
Kusama once wrote of the importance of sharing “love and peace” through art. That sentiment offers a fitting way to reflect upon a career defined by an extraordinary commitment to creation. Her dots, mirrors, pumpkins and infinite spaces have become part of the visual vocabulary of our time, but their power lies in something more profound: an invitation to look beyond ourselves and imagine a world without boundaries.
Yayoi Kusama leaves behind not simply an instantly recognisable aesthetic, but a body of work that continues to ask what it means to disappear into something larger than oneself — and, through art, to find infinity.
