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Yayoi Kusama has died in Tokyo at the age of 97. From her celebrated polka dots and Infinity Mirror Rooms to her iconic pumpkins, the Japanese artist spanned more than seventy years of art history, transforming her personal vision into a universal language.
Yayoi Kusama, one of the most influential and recognizable figures in contemporary art, died on 14 August 2026 in a hospital in Tokyo, at the age of 97. The news was officially announced on 27 August by her studio and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation. The artist continued painting until the final days of her life, pursuing a practice that embraced painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature and poetry.
With her polka dots, Infinity Nets, pumpkins and mirrored environments, Kusama created an instantly recognizable universe, one that transcended the boundaries of art to become part of the collective imagination. Yet behind the apparent immediacy of her imagery lies a complex and deeply personal body of work centred on repetition, infinity, the dissolution of the self and the relationship between the individual and the universe.
From childhood visions to the New York avant-garde
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began drawing as a child. The hallucinatory experiences she described having from an early age — forms, flowers and patterns that seemed to multiply and invade the space around her — would become one of the key foundations of her artistic language. Art soon became a means of giving shape to, and gaining control over, those visions.
At the end of the 1950s, she left Japan for the United States and settled in New York, entering an art scene undergoing profound transformation. These were the years in which Pop Art, Minimalism and new forms of performance were emerging, and Kusama developed a radical and independent practice that often anticipated experiments that would come to define the following decade.
It was during this period that she created the Infinity Nets, large canvases covered in obsessive networks of repeated marks. Their surfaces seem to have neither beginning nor end: an image of infinity that would become a constant throughout her career.
During the 1960s, her practice expanded into space through sculpture, happenings and installations. In 1965, she created her first Infinity Mirror Room, using mirrors and repetition to transform a physical space into an apparently limitless dimension. One year later, at the 1966 Venice Biennale, she provocatively presented Narcissus Garden, an installation made up of hundreds of reflective spheres, questioning the relationship between artwork, audience and the art market itself.
Polka dots, pumpkins and Infinity Rooms: the birth of a universal language
Repetition lies at the heart of Kusama’s artistic practice. Her famous polka dots are not merely a decorative motif, but a tool through which the boundaries between body, artwork and environment begin to disappear.
This is the principle Kusama described as “self-obliteration”: the erasure of individuality within a potentially infinite space.
The same process can be found in the Infinity Mirror Rooms, environments in which lights, colours and objects multiply endlessly through mirrored surfaces. Entering these installations means temporarily losing one’s spatial reference points and becoming immersed in an image that appears to extend without limits.
Alongside the polka dots, another subject became inseparable from the artist: the pumpkin. Present in her memories since childhood, Kusama gradually transformed it into a monumental sculptural form and one of the most recognizable symbols of her work.
From late recognition to global phenomenon
Kusama’s international success was not immediate. After her years within the New York avant-garde, the artist returned to Japan in the 1970s and, from 1977, chose to live voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, while continuing to work every day in her nearby studio.
It was particularly from the 1990s onward that the art world began to fully acknowledge the significance of her practice. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, while in the years that followed major international museums dedicated exhibitions and retrospectives to her work.
From an avant-garde artist, Kusama gradually became a true icon of contemporary culture. Her Infinity Rooms attracted millions of visitors, her works entered the collections of some of the world’s most important museums, and her visual language expanded into fashion and popular culture through major international collaborations, including those with Louis Vuitton.
Yet beyond her extraordinary popularity, Kusama never stopped returning to the questions that had shaped her work from the beginning: infinity, obsession, the fragility of the individual and the ability of art to transform personal experience into something universal.
Yayoi Kusama’s legacy
With the death of Yayoi Kusama, the art world loses one of the last major figures of the twentieth-century avant-garde, but above all an artist capable of creating an imagery that continues to resonate across generations and audiences.
Her work crosses categories often seen as distant from one another: Pop Art and Minimalism, painting and performance, introspection and spectacle, avant-garde experimentation and mass culture. It is a journey that began long before immersive art became one of the most widespread languages of contemporary culture.
Her studio recalled that Kusama continued painting until the final days of her life, never abandoning her brush or the artistic research that accompanied her throughout her career. The Yayoi Kusama Foundation has announced its intention to continue preserving her legacy through art, keeping alive her message of hope for future generations.
Yayoi Kusama leaves behind a universe without boundaries: a space made of dots, mirrors and repetition, in which the individual seems, once again, to dissolve into infinity.
