There are artists who create works of art. And then there are those who, over time, create an entire universe with its own laws, rhythms, symbols, and coordinate system. Yayoi Kusama was precisely such an artist.
On August 14, 2026, one of the most recognizable figures of contemporary art passed away in Tokyo. Yayoi Kusama was 97 years old. Her death was announced by David Zwirner, one of the galleries that represented her work. And perhaps it would be difficult to find a more apt image for Kusama's farewell than infinity, for her entire life was an attempt to see beyond the visible: to dissolve the boundary between man and space, between the singular and the infinite, between reality and the world that existed within her.
Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan. Even as a child, she experienced visual hallucinations, which later became one of the sources of her artistic language. The famous dots that cover her canvases, sculptures, rooms, and objects weren't created as a decorative device. For Kusama, they were a way to represent infinity—an infinity in which the individual human figure gradually disappears. She called her early paintings "Infinity Nets." These were vast surfaces, almost completely engulfed in a repeating pattern. Dot after dot, line after line, the image seemed to have no beginning or end. This was one of the key characteristics of Kusama's art: she transformed repetition into a form of freedom.
In 1957, the artist traveled to the United States and soon moved to New York, where she found herself at the center of the avant-garde art scene. She associated with Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and other important figures in American art. However, Kusama's path to recognition was not an easy one. She worked at the very limits of her physical and financial capabilities, faced sexism and racism, and for a long time remained less well-known than the male artists around her. Yet her ideas were unstoppable.
In the 1960s, Kusama expanded far beyond painting. She created sculptures, performances, and provocative happenings, working with the body, mirrors, soft objects, and repetitive forms. Her art gradually ceased to be a painting viewed from the outside and became a space the viewer was expected to enter.
Thus emerged her famous Infinity Mirror Rooms—mirrored spaces in which light, reflections, and countless repetitions create the sensation of being within an infinite universe. In these rooms, a person suddenly becomes simultaneously enormous and insignificant. You see yourself and then instantly lose yourself among hundreds of reflections. It is impossible to determine where the room ends, where the mirror begins, or whether its boundaries even exist. This is why the Infinity Mirror Rooms became more than just installations. They became one of the main visual symbols of contemporary art.
But behind the superficial brightness, the red and yellow dots, the mirrored rooms, the giant pumpkins, and the saturated colors, there was always another side to Kusama. Her art was deeply personal. It intertwined themes of self-disappearance, repetition, anxiety, sexuality, life, and death. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. From 1977 onward, she voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, continuing to work in her studio nearby. For her, art wasn't a separate part of life—it was a way to continue life itself. Alongside painting and sculpture, Kusama wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and autobiographical texts.
Later, the world finally saw the scope of her legacy. In 1993, Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, a museum dedicated to her opened in Tokyo. Her retrospectives drew huge crowds worldwide, and Infinity Mirror Rooms became a cultural phenomenon extending far beyond the typical museum audience. In 2014, she was named the most popular artist of the year after record-breaking attendance at her exhibitions in Latin America.
Kusama became a rare example of an artist who managed to combine elite contemporary art with popular culture without losing her own language. Her dots appeared everywhere: in paintings and sculptures, in architectural spaces, on clothing and design objects. Her celebrated collaborations with Louis Vuitton held a special place, bringing her visual world directly into the fashion space. Kusama demonstrated that contemporary art can exist not only in museums: it can become part of everyday life, clothing, the street, photography, and memory. But perhaps this is precisely the paradox of her legacy.
Kusama spent her entire life striving for the disappearance of the individual—for the individual to dissolve into an endless repetition of dots and reflections. Ultimately, it was these dots that made her one of the most recognizable artists in the world. Her works remain. Mirrored rooms in which the viewer loses all sense of time remain. Endless networks remain. Her famous pumpkins, which have become almost independent symbols of her world, remain. Paintings, sculptures, books, performances, and countless reflections remain, in which each new viewer, for a few minutes, becomes part of her universe.
Yayoi Kusama lived to be 97, and for almost all that time, she continued to wrestle with finitude. She transformed the fear of disappearance into color. Loneliness into infinite space, repetition into freedom, and her own inner world into art that turned out to be much greater than itself.
