Kusama turned her hallucinations into work that ranged from dot-covered paintings and pumpkin sculptures to infinity mirror room installations.
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist known for her polka-dot paintings, pumpkin sculptures and immersive “Infinity Mirror Rooms”, has died at the age of 97.
Announcing her death on Thursday, Kusama’s company said she died from multiple organ failure at a hospital in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, on August 14 .
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“Until the very end, she never put down her paintbrush, continuing to explore eternal love and the soul,” the statement said.
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama had a troubled childhood marked by family conflict. She began drawing as a child, channelling the hallucinations she experienced into vibrant art featuring dots, nets and infinity motifs.
“I still see hallucinations even now,” she told reporters in 2017. “Dots come flying everywhere – on my dress, the floor, things I’m carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them.”
After studying art in Japan, Kusama moved to the United States in the late 1950s, and quickly made a splash in New York’s avant-garde scene, exhibiting net paintings, soft sculptures and creating body painting events to protest against the Vietnam War.
She returned to Japan in 1973 and, four years later, voluntarily checked into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she remained for the rest of her life, being driven each morning to a small studio nearby to continue working.
Repetitive motifs were her trademark, in various shapes, resembling netting, swirls or worms, but most often dots, dancing proudly on her canvases, or as sparkling balls or dots of light in her installations.
“Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos,” the artist, dubbed the “queen of polka dots”, once wrote.
In her later years, Kusama became something of an art celebrity.
She partnered with fashion houses, including Louis Vuitton, and her illustrations and likeness appeared across a range of licensed products, teacups, T-shirts, keychains and store-window displays.
As her fame grew, her international exhibitions attracted huge crowds and her works commanded lofty prices. One painting, Untitled (Nets) (1959), sold for $10.5m in 2022.
She received the Order of Culture, Japan’s highest honour for artists, in 2016.
David Zwirner, an art dealer who represented Kusama for 15 years, said she “was without a doubt the most famous living artist in the world” at the time of her passing.
“Kusama’s art influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art, and performance art,” he added.