Yayoi Kusuma 1929 - 2026: An avant garde artist whose star will continue to shine

Like many appreciators of art, we have enjoyed numerous works and immersive experiences by Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama. This week her death on 14 August was announced by her studio, where she continued to work until the final days of her life, reaching age 97.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama's work is vibrant, hopeful, engaging and fun. Departing from the traditions of Japanese art, Kusama was driven, in part, by her early experiences of hallucinations. As a child, she saw patterns spreading across objects, rooms and even her own body, and through her work she sought to share that experience with others.

Repetition became central to her art: dots, nets, mirrored surfaces, pumpkins and endless fields of colour, lights, stars. She moved to New York in 1958 and became part of its experimental art world, developing her Infinity Net paintings, soft sculptures, performances and installations at a time when very few Japanese women had a presence in the international avant-garde.

MoMA describes her repeated forms as growing directly from her struggle with hallucinations, while Kusama herself said that her work was an expression of her life and particularly of her mental illness.

Kusama was also frequently ahead of the art world that surrounded her. In 1966 she appeared, uninvited, at the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, arranging 1,500 mirrored balls outside the Italian pavilion and selling them to visitors for $2 each until organisers intervened. By the 1970s her international profile had faded and she returned to Japan.

She voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977 and continued to live there while working daily in a nearby studio. Hence, one of the central ideas in her work, which she called ‘self-obliteration’ was a result of how patterns engulfed her entire universe, dissolving the distinction between herself and her surroundings. Later, the Infinity Mirror Rooms transformed this sensation into something she could repeatedly reconstruct through art.

Her rebirth or second act came decades later when the immersive mirrored rooms, obsessive patterns and pumpkins she had developed since the 1960s found a new audience. By the 2000s, these works transformed Kusama into a global cultural figure. Museum exhibitions became blockbuster exhibitions and international events led her imagery to be extended into fashion, collaborations, public sculpture and popular culture. Her 2024–25 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria became the most visited ticketed exhibition in Australian history and we certainly saw countless books of the exhibition ordered by our customers, teachers and schools.

It was an unlikely trajectory for an artist who spent much of her career outside the establishment. Kusama ultimately outlived the movements she was associated with, and the artists against whom she once struggled for recognition. It was an unlikely trajectory for an artist who spent much of her career outside the establishment. Kusama ultimately outlived the movements she was associated with, and the artists against whom she once struggled for recognition.

Her work now has a permanent home in the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, which opened in 2017 and is dedicated to her paintings, sculptures, installations and archival material. The paintings remain central to her practice: from the early nets to the later canvases crowded with dots, eyes, faces and organic forms, these became one of the most recognisable bodies of work in contemporary art.

Image credits

• Banner: Yayoi Kusama at Venice Biennale 1966.  © Yayoi Kusama.
• Painting: Infinity Nets 1960, circa 1979, image from Sotheby's.
  
  
• Below: Kusama with Pumpkin, 2010, "Yayoi Kusama" at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

See our favourite titles featuring Yayoi Kusama.