Renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama died on Wednesday at a hospital in Tokyo, according to her gallery, David Zwirner. She was 97. Kusama’s work, with its fizzy pop-culture style and preponderance of polka dots, spanned painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance, as well as literature, fashion, and product design. Her artworks regularly fetched record-breaking prices at auction.
Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, Kusama studied Nihonga, a formal style of Japanese painting, in Kyoto. She began painting at the age of 10, with her early works reflecting hallucinogenic visions that often took the form of dots. The motif—which she later described as representing the cosmos—would become her signature. “After all, well, the moon is a polka dot, the sun is a polka dot, and then, the Earth where we live is also a polka dot,” she told a journalist.
Kusama moved to New York in 1957, attracted by the city’s experimental art scene. Over the next decade, she became part of the New York avant-garde, first attracting notice with her Infinity Nets, a series of artworks featuring undulating, apparently endless patterns. Kusama instinctively knew how to generate publicity through her work. In the 1960s, she became notorious for her “happenings”—spontaneous and provocative performances, often involving nudity, staged in places such as Central Park, the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Many were created as protests against the Vietnam
Many were created as protests against the Vietnam War or as campaigns for gay rights and sexual liberation. (In the 1970s, she created orgy clothing intended to be worn by several people at the same time.) During this period, Kusama exhibited her work alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and other prominent avant-garde artists. She was friends with Warhol in the early 1960s, but she later accused him of stealing her ideas.
In 1966, Japanese officials refused to let Kusama show in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She responded by covering the lawn adjacent to the pavilion with 1,500 mirrored orbs and dancing around them while wearing a leotard. (Unsurprisingly, the artwork, entitled Narcissus Garden, got more attention than the official exhibit.) Kusama created the first of her signature Infinity Mirror Rooms in 1965 with Phalli’s Field, a room filled with phallic sculptures.
Her aim was to transform the seemingly infinite repetition of her canvases into an immersive experience. The rooms later reached unprecedented popularity in the era of the selfie. It would be impossible to separate Kusama’s art from her mental health. In 1973, she returned to Japan, where she began writing surreal novels and poetry. In 1977, she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she eventually became a permanent resident.
Kusama was quick to grasp the importance
Kusama was quick to grasp the importance of her visual identity in relation to her work, making her characteristic red wig and polka-dot dresses extensions of her art. That aesthetic sensibility would bring about a range of collaborations with beauty and fashion brands. She created a limited-edition lip gloss with Lancôme in 2011, and in 2012, she designed a range of clothing, accessories, and bags with Marc Jacobs, then Louis Vuitton’s creative director.
The products were sold at a pop-up shop in New York, followed by six more pop-ups around the world. In 2017, she collaborated with streetwear label X-girl to create a capsule collection covered in polka dots. Kusama was named the world’s most popular artist of 2014, according to The Art Newspaper; in 2015, she became the first woman artist to receive the Order of Culture, one of the highest honors bestowed by Japan’s Imperial Family; and in 2016, she was selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.
Over the past decade, exhibitions of her work have toured the world, including Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, North America, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum, run by the Yayoi Kusama Foundation, opened in Tokyo’s Shinjuku suburb; the same year, a retrospective, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., drawing a record-breaking 475,000 visitors.
More recent institutional shows included Kusama: Cosmic Nature
More recent institutional shows included “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” at the New York Botanical Garden in 2021, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023, and a 2024–2025 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. This September, a traveling European exhibition that has already made stops in Switzerland and Germany will open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
“It’s been one of the great privileges of my professional life to have been able to represent Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary art for the last fifteen years,” David Zwirner stated following the artist’s death. “The last time Kusama visited New York, a city where she lived for many years, was in 2013. During that visit, she opened the first of many exhibitions in our galleries that had hour-long lines for the chance to experience her work.
Her steadfast message of love and peace has now reached millions of admirers around the globe. At the time of her passing, Kusama was, without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world.”
Source: www.vogue.com
