Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026: The Artist Behind the Dots

The news arrived twelve days late, which feels oddly appropriate for an artist who spent five decades being overlooked before the world decided she was essential. Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August at a hospital in Tokyo, aged 97, of multiple organ failure. Her studio and the Yayoi Kusama Museum did not announce it until 26 August, alongside her gallery David Zwirner. The statement noted that she had continued to paint until her final days. Anyone who has followed her career will find that entirely believable.

For British audiences, Kusama occupies a peculiar place. She is probably the most photographed artist of the last fifteen years and simultaneously one of the least read. Millions of people have queued at Tate Modern for ninety seconds inside a mirrored box. Rather fewer could tell you that she was a serious painter working in New York in the early 1960s, or that she staged nude protest performances outside the New York Stock Exchange, or that she has lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric facility since the late 1970s, walking to her studio each morning and back each evening. Her death is a reasonable moment to close that gap.

A career that ran backwards

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture, to a prosperous and conservative family who disapproved of her ambitions. She began making art as a child, prompted in part by hallucinations in which fields of dots spread across every surface she could see. That is not a metaphor she invented later for the benefit of critics. It is the origin of the work, and she described it consistently for seventy years.

She moved to the United States in 1958 and spent the next fifteen years in New York, producing the Infinity Nets — vast canvases covered in obsessive, hand-painted loops — alongside soft sculpture, mirrored installations and performance. She was in the room where American art of the 1960s was made, exhibiting near Warhol, Judd and Oldenburg. Her contribution was frequently absorbed and rarely credited. She returned to Japan in 1973 exhausted and unwell, and effectively disappeared from the international conversation for roughly two decades.

The recovery began in 1993, when she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, and accelerated through the 2000s until she became, by some counts, the best-selling female artist alive. It is one of the strangest career shapes in modern art: a first act of genuine innovation, a long silence, and a third act of global saturation that arrived when she was in her seventies and eighties.

What Britain has

Tate’s 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern was the pivot point for her British reputation. It is also where Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life was made — one of her largest installations, in which visitors walk a narrow reflective path over shallow water while hundreds of coloured lights pulse and repeat to the horizon. The work was presented to Tate by the artist together with Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro in 2015, and formally accessioned in 2019. It went on long display at Tate Modern from May 2021, paired with the earlier Chandelier of Grief, and stayed up until April 2024 after repeated extensions. It remains in the national collection, which means it will come back.

Her London gallery, Victoria Miro, has represented her since the late 1990s and did a great deal of the patient work of building her audience here — showing the paintings and the pumpkins as well as the crowd-pleasers, and doing so long before the queues formed. That is worth noticing on a site devoted to independent galleries. Kusama’s late fame did not descend from nowhere. It was constructed, exhibition by exhibition, by dealers and curators who backed a difficult older woman for years without much certainty of return.

The problem of the selfie

There is a familiar complaint that the Infinity Rooms are Instagram bait, that the crowds are there for the photograph rather than the art, and that the institutional appetite for them says something unflattering about museum economics. Some of that is fair. But it is worth holding two things at once. The rooms are genuinely popular in a way very little contemporary art manages, and they are also about self-obliteration, mortality and the terror of endless repetition — themes Kusama had been working on since before most of her audience was born. She titled one of them Chandelier of Grief. The spectacle and the seriousness are not separable.

Her death will trigger the usual mechanics: retrospectives announced, prices reassessed, estate carefully managed, the market testing what a Kusama is worth without Kusama. Expect a major British survey within three or four years, and expect it to be busy.

What she leaves is harder to price. She made work about mental illness for sixty years without ever framing it as a confession or a cure, and she did it with a discipline that outlasted almost everyone who dismissed her. If you have only ever seen her in a mirrored room, the paintings are waiting whenever you want them.