Yayoi Kusama, who turned a childhood of terrifying visions into one of the most singular bodies of work in modern art, has sadly died at the age of 97. She passed away on the 14th August 2026 at a hospital in Tokyo, of multiple organ failure, her gallery, David Zwirner, announced on the 27th of August. She leaves behind a career of almost eight decades and an influence that reaches form the avant-garde lofts of 1960s New York to the queues that still wind around museums wherever her mirrored rooms appear.
To stand inside one of those rooms, walls of glass and points of light receding into apparent infinity, was to glimpse the world as Kusama had seen it since she was a child. It is difficult to think of another artist whose private experience so completely became a public gift.
A childhood of dots
She was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, in the mountains of Nagano, into a prosperous family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm. The prosperity did not make for happiness: her mother was hostile to her daughter's ambitions and often cruel, her father frequently absent. From around the age of ten, Kusama began to experience vivid hallucinations; flashes of light, auras, fields of flowers that seemed to speak, and above all dense fields of dots that multiplied until they threatened to swallow her whole. She would later call this sensation "self-obliteration," and she made it the engine of her art.
Drawing and painting were, from the beginning, less a vocation than a means of survival; a way to pin down and master what her mind kept conjuring. "If it were not for art," she once said, "I would have killed myself a long time ago." It is a sentence worth sitting with, because it explains almost everything that followed: the relentless output, the obsessive repetition, the sheer volume of a life's work made by someone for whom stopping was never really an option.
New York, and a hard apprenticeship
After training in traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto, a discipline whose rigidity she found stifling, Kusama grew determined to leave a Japan she considered "too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women." In 1957 she sailed for the United States, reportedly destroying much of her early work before she went. She had first written to the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who offered encouragement and, later, quiet practical help. By 1958 Kusama was in New York.
The years that followed were both fertile and bruising. She produced her first Infinity Nets; vast canvases covered edge to edge in tiny, repeated loops, paintings with no centre and no border, all surface and no hierarchy. She made her Accumulations, everyday objects such as chairs and boats smothered in hand-sewn soft protrusions, turning private fear into something she could hold. In 1965 she created Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli's Field, the first of the immersive environments for which she would eventually become world-famous. By the late 1960s she was staging polka-dotted, anti-war "happenings" in Central Park and outside museums.
Yet recognition and money largely eluded her. She watched male contemporaries, among them Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, win acclaim for ideas that ran close to her own, and the combined weight of the era's sexism and racism denied her the standing and support they received. She was hospitalised from overwork, and struggled financially throughout the decade. When she returned to Japan in 1973, it was to an art world that received her coldly; one collector dismissed her as a "scandal queen."
The room she chose
In 1977, after years of depression, Kusama voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She would live there, by her own choice, for the rest of her life, nearly half a century, walking each day to a studio nearby to work. It is one of the most remarkable arrangements in the history of art: an institution not as confinement but as a stable base from which she produced some of her boldest and best-loved work, and from which she also wrote surreal, often harrowing novels and poetry.
Her rediscovery came slowly and then all at once. A 1989 retrospective in New York reopened the conversation; representing Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale confirmed her return. From the 1990s she added the motif that may be her most affectionately regarded of all; the polka-dot pumpkin, a humble, homely form she had loved since childhood, monumentalised most famously as the yellow gourd perched on a pier at Naoshima.
Dots as a way to infinity
For Kusama the polka dot was never merely decorative. It was cosmic and personal at once. "A polka-dot has the form of the sun," she said, "and also the form of the moon. Polka dots are a way to infinity." And: "Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos." To dissolve oneself into that pattern, to be obliterated and, in the same instant, joined to everything, was the whole of her philosophy, and the reason her mirrored rooms move people who know nothing of art history.
By the 2010s she had become, improbably, one of the most popular artists alive: the top-selling woman at auction, her White No. 28 fetching $7.1 million in 2014; the subject of record-breaking museum shows such as the Hirshhorn's Infinity Mirrors; the founder of her own museum in Tokyo in 2017; and, through collaborations with Louis Vuitton, a name recognised far beyond the gallery. Her dealer David Zwirner noted that her large-scale installations "single-handedly pioneered what is now referred to as experiential art"; the immersive exhibitions that now fill museums the world over owe her an enormous, often unacknowledged debt. Her London gallerists, Victoria Miro and Glenn Scott Wright, put it more simply: "Kusama was loved by millions of people across the world, and her art will leave a lasting and profound impact on humanity."
Hers was not a flawless life, and she did not present it as one. In 2023 she publicly apologised for racist remarks about Black people that appeared in her early writings — a reminder that even the most visionary figures are products of their time and their failings. It is possible to hold that alongside the immense generosity of what she made.
Infinite
What endures is the work, and the spirit behind it: an artist who took the most frightening contents of her own mind and remade them as something luminous, endlessly repeated, and open to anyone willing to step inside. Kusama spent a lifetime dissolving the boundary between the self and the infinite. Now she has crossed it. The dots go on without her; as she always insisted they would.