Yayoi Kusama Japanese, 1929-2026

Yayoi Kusama is a major figure in the international avant-garde of Japanese art. She began drawing and painting in her childhood, a time when she experienced her first visions and hallucinations.

She quickly developed a personal practice focused on abstraction. Her early works were already marked by the repetition of motifs, networks, and proliferating forms that would become the foundations of her artistic language.
In 1957, Kusama moved to the United States and joined the vibrant art scene of New York. There, she developed her famous Infinity Nets, vast canvases covered with thousands of small, repeated motifs that seem to extend indefinitely. This practice of repetition constitutes the founding principle of her work: the motif multiplies until it erases the distinction between form and background, between object and space. From the early 1960s, she transposed this principle to sculpture with her Accumulations, covering familiar objects with a multitude of repeated, soft forms.

Her work then expanded to include installation, performance, film, and fashion.

After returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama continued her artistic and literary activities in parallel.
From the 1990s onward, her immersive installations gained increasing international recognition, while her signature motifs (polka dots, networks, mirrors, and pumpkins) became elements of an immediately recognizable vocabulary. She represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and notably received the Order of Culture of Japan in 2016.
In the final decades of her career, Kusama pursued, with extraordinary consistency, a body of work centered on the notions of infinity, proliferation, and the disappearance of the individual in space. Kusama died in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97.