Remembering Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026

Few artists have created a visual language so instantly recognisable that a single dot can evoke an entire universe.

Yayoi Kusama did.

The Japanese artist, whose hypnotic polka dots, infinity nets, mirrored environments and extraordinary pumpkins transformed contemporary art, died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97. The announcement of her death came on 27 August from Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio, which revealed that remarkably, she had continued painting until her final days.

Her passing marks the end of one of the most extraordinary lives in modern art — but it is difficult to speak about Kusama in terms of endings.

Her entire artistic universe was concerned with precisely the opposite: repetition, continuation, eternity and infinity.

A Life Lived Through Art

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations when she was young. Patterns appeared to multiply around her; dots and nets seemed capable of covering objects, rooms and even herself.

Rather than attempting to escape these experiences, she turned them into art.

Dots, nets and repetition became fundamental to her work. Kusama described an idea of self-obliteration in which the individual could seemingly disappear into an endlessly repeating universe. It would become one of the central philosophies running through her career.

In 1957, Kusama left Japan for the United States and soon established herself within New York's radical avant-garde.

Her monumental Infinity Net paintings, composed from seemingly endless repeated marks, were unlike almost anything being produced at the time. She subsequently moved into sculpture, performance, fashion, film and immersive installation.

During the 1960s, Kusama staged provocative happenings and anti-war performances and experimented with body painting and fashion. Her work crossed boundaries between artistic disciplines long before such interdisciplinary practice became commonplace.

She returned permanently to Japan in 1973. From 1977, she voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, travelling to her nearby studio to work. Far from ending her career, this structure enabled an extraordinary period of sustained creativity. She also wrote poetry and novels alongside her visual art.

Art was not simply Kusama's profession.

It was the architecture of her life.

Into Infinity

Perhaps nowhere is Kusama's philosophy more powerfully experienced than in her celebrated Infinity Mirror Rooms.

Mirrors, coloured lights and repeated forms dissolve the conventional boundaries of a room. Reflections continue apparently forever, while the viewer becomes part of the work itself.

The experience can be beautiful, disorientating and strangely emotional.

Her dots operate in much the same way.

A single dot is insignificant. Thousands become an environment. Millions suggest something without beginning or end.

And then there are the pumpkins.

Kusama transformed the humble pumpkin into one of contemporary art's most recognisable motifs, covering its voluptuous organic form with repeating dots and translating it across paintings, sculptures and monumental installations.

These motifs made Kusama enormously accessible to the public without diminishing the complex ideas underneath them.

Her art could be joyful and playful while simultaneously addressing obsession, anxiety, identity, disappearance, love, death and eternity.

When Kusama Met Fashion

Kusama also understood something that the art world would increasingly embrace: creativity does not necessarily have to remain within the walls of a museum.

Her imagery entered fashion, design and popular culture, most spectacularly through her relationship with Louis Vuitton.

The house's relationship with Kusama was initiated by designer Marc Jacobs and produced the celebrated Louis Vuitton–Yayoi Kusama collaboration in 2012. More than a decade later, the partnership was revisited on an extraordinary global scale. Louis Vuitton itself describes the project as a meeting between Kusama's groundbreaking artworks and fashion, translating her signature visual universe into another creative discipline.

Her dots appeared across bags, clothing, accessories, windows and spectacular installations.

It demonstrated something remarkable about Kusama's work.

A visual language born from deeply personal experiences in Matsumoto could eventually cover buildings and luxury objects around the world — yet remain unmistakably hers.

Kusama had effectively turned repetition into identity.

From Outsider to Global Phenomenon

Recognition did not arrive overnight.

Kusama spent decades pursuing her vision before becoming the extraordinary global cultural figure familiar to today's audiences.

Eventually, major museums around the world staged exhibitions of her work. Huge audiences queued for her installations, and her market became one of the most significant achieved by a living female artist. In 2016, Japan awarded her its prestigious Order of Culture.

Even in her final years, Kusama continued exhibiting internationally. Her official exhibition programme extended across museums and galleries from Japan and Singapore to Basel, Cologne and Amsterdam.

But perhaps her greatest achievement cannot be measured through auction prices, visitor numbers or awards.

Kusama demonstrated the extraordinary possibilities that can emerge when an artist refuses to abandon a personal creative language.

For more than seven decades, she returned obsessively to dots, repetition, infinity, love and the universe.

And somehow they never stopped evolving.

INFINITE EMBRACE (2023)

Homage to Yayoi Kusama

A sculpture conceived by Hiren Kothari in 2023

Following the passing of Yayoi Kusama, Hiren Kothari's Infinite Embrace is presented as an expression of admiration and respect for a woman whose extraordinary imagination changed the way generations experience contemporary art.

It is not an attempt to reproduce a Kusama artwork.

Instead, Kothari takes the idea of repetition and infinity that became so deeply associated with her artistic language and uses it to explore something universal: the love between a mother and her child.

A Love Without End

Infinite Embrace is a celebration of the profound and instinctive love between a mother and child — a bond that begins before words and continues without end.

The sculpture's two figures flow into one another.

The mother curves protectively around the smaller child. Their bodies become intertwined until it becomes difficult to determine precisely where one form ends and the other begins.

That continuity is deliberate.

It represents love, protection, belonging and the infinite connection between parent and child.

There is tenderness in the sculpture, but there is also strength. The mother does not simply stand beside the child; she envelops and protects it.

The embrace becomes the sculpture.

The Meaning of the Dots

Across the transparent form appear repeating red dots, an unmistakable visual acknowledgement of Kusama and her extraordinary exploration of repetition and infinity.

But within Infinite Embrace, Kothari gives repetition an additional meaning.

Each dot can be imagined as a moment.

A first touch.
A first smile.
A sleepless night.
A birthday.
A tear.
A moment of protection.
A moment of letting go.

Individually they may appear small. Together they form a lifetime.

Just as Kusama demonstrated how repetition could transform the smallest visual element into something seemingly infinite, Infinite Embrace uses repetition as a metaphor for the countless moments through which love is created.

A Homage Made With Respect

Kusama's death inevitably encourages the art world to consider what she leaves behind.

There will be exhibitions, retrospectives and scholarly examinations of her enormous contribution to twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

But there will also be artists and designers who simply feel gratitude.

For Hiren Kothari, Infinite Embrace belongs to that latter tradition.

It is a personal salute to an artist who demonstrated the courage required to create an entirely individual world — and then invited millions of people inside it.

Kusama spent her life contemplating infinity.

In Infinite Embrace, infinity becomes love.

Not romantic love or fleeting desire, but perhaps one of the purest forms of love we experience: the instinctive bond between a mother and her child.

And that gives the sculpture its final thought:

A mother's embrace may last only a moment.
A mother's love is infinite.

INFINITE EMBRACE
Homage to Yayoi Kusama
Concept & Design: Hiren Kothari
Gallery Privé, 2023