At 97, the Japanese artist passed away in Tokyo on August 14. Kusama's celebrated career spanned 70 years of art with a single language: emotional, colorful, and sensual repetition.&nbsp;

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama grew up in a wealthy, conservative family in a Japan that was about to enter World War II. At the age of ten, she began to experience hallucinations, and drawing became her defense against the fear of dissolving into an invisible world that threatened to engulf her. After first&nbsp;studying traditional nihonga painting in Kyoto, she turned to abstraction in the 1950s. However, it was New York that gave her a language and a new audience. In October 1959, the Brata Gallery hosted Kusama's first American solo exhibition, featuring her "Infinity Nets." It's easy to get lost while looking at these large canvases featuring meticulously patterned networks of dots and lines.&nbsp;

Yayoi Kusama at age ten, in 1939. Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama

Four years later, in 1963, at the Gertrude Stein Gallery, Kusama's Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show&nbsp;shifted the focus from the surface to the object. The exhibition featured a rowboat entirely covered in padded fabric protuberances, or phallic forms, that ironically inverted sexual anxiety and effectively took aim at the machismo of the art system. Fans came quickly to see this avant-garde creation.&nbsp;
In 1966, Kusama staged an unauthorized intervention at the 33rd Venice Biennale. Without an official invitation to exhibit her work at the Venice Biennale, she still arranged hundreds of mirrored spheres on the lawn in front of the Italian Pavilion. She called the installation&nbsp;Narcissus Garden and sold the spheres to visitors and passersby for around two dollars each.&nbsp;

Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama in Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennial, 1966, installation, 1,500 plastic mirrors balls, variable dimensions, Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo-Singapore, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, David Zwirner, New York, © Yayoi Kusama

From that season onward, Kusama has never stopped working on the fringes of the perceptible, constructing environments that ask the body to enter the work—such as the&nbsp;Infinity Mirror Rooms in which mirrors and lights multiply the space until it seems bottomless, or Gleaming Lights of the Souls, a room suspended between installation and vision. Alongside the mirrors, she developed a repertoire of recurring shapes: mushrooms, polka dots, and especially pumpkins.&nbsp;
In Kusama's autobiography, "Infinity Net," she observes that in Japan, the vegetable is not held in high regard, and precisely for this reason, or perhaps despite it, she falls in love with the pumpkin, praising its graceful silhouette, its generous lack of pretension, and what she calls its "solid spiritual balance."

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 1981, cloth an acrylic on canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo-Singapore, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, David Zwirner, New York

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 1994, Naoshima, Japan, 2022. Photography by Kristen de La Vallière, Courtesy of David Zwirner

The first chapter of Kusama's fruitful collaboration with Louis Vuitton dates back to 2012, when Marc Jacobs, then the house's creative director, entrusted her with a collection that coincided with the launch of the artist's New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.&nbsp;

Bag from the Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama Collection. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

In 2023, Louis Vuitton underwent a global makeover in collaboration with Kusama. Flagship store windows were filled with oversized pumpkins; in New York, an automaton in the artist's likeness painted polka dots in the window; in Paris, a giant Kusama looked out from the roof of the Champs-Élysées store; in Tokyo, three-dimensional sculptures occupied the façades; and in Milan, an installation of giant polka-dot pumpkin sculptures filled Piazza San Babila.&nbsp;
Throughout her life, Kusama cultivated a minimalism imbued with emotion, color, sensuality, and organic matter.

Yayoi Kusama, Kusama with Dots Obsession, 2012, mixed media, Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation, 1952, ink on paperboard, 42.2 x 30.2 cm, Courtesy of MoMA and Yayoi Kusama.

"My whole life is painted here. Every day, any day. I will never stop dedicating my entire life to the love I bring to the universe. Oh, my beloved art. In the challenge of creating new art, I work like someone who is dying; these works are my everything," Kusama said of her life and career as an artist.&nbsp;

Yayoi Kusama, Suit, 1962, painted textile application on suit, hanger, 101.6 x 76.2 x 10.2 cm, 40 x 30 x 4 in. Photography by Albin Dahlström, for Moderna Museet. Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.

Her work achieved widespread recognition in 1989, with solo exhibitions at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. In 1993, she represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale to critical acclaim.
In 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York jointly organized Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968,&nbsp;which traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.&nbsp;

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room Phallis Field, 1965, installation, sewn stuffed fabric and mirrors, 360 x 360 x 324 cm, Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama, Kusama with Macaroni Girl, Dressing Table and Infinity Net Painting, 1964, installation, variable dimensions, Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.

Since the late 1990s, her exhibitions have attracted record-breaking audiences, and her global fame has grown in tandem with social media, where her works are shared by millions of people.
Between 2012 and 2015, three major solo exhibitions traveled simultaneously to Japan, Asia, and Central and South America. One of these,&nbsp;Infinite Obsession,&nbsp;attracted over two million visitors between the MALBA-Fundación Costantini in Buenos Aires and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, before arriving at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.
A 2011-2012 retrospective toured to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2016,&nbsp;Time magazine named Yayoi Kusama one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Yayoi Kusama, Blue Polka Dots, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 194 x 194 cm, courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo-Singapore, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, David Zwirner, New York, Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.

In 2025, a major European traveling exhibition opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, the first Kusama retrospective in Switzerland. This year, the show moved to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and it closed on August 2, 2026. Next, the retrospective will continue at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it will run from Sept. 11 to Jan. 17, 2027.&nbsp;

L'OFFICIEL Looks Back on Yayoi Kusama's Enduring Artistic Legacy

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