Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97. Her official website carried the announcement on 27 August 2026, in a statement signed by Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc., which said she died at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 — thirteen days before the death was made public. The statement describes a lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation and a career that took in visual art, performance, fiction and poetry, and it notes that she continued to paint until her final days.
Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama built one of the most immediately recognisable visual languages in post-war art. Infinity Nets, polka dots, pumpkins, mirrored environments and fields of repeated forms became the means through which she examined infinity, repetition, obsession and the relationship between the individual and the universe. Repetition carried across media: it began in painting, moved into the accumulation sculptures that covered domestic objects in massed forms, and then into installation, performance, film, fashion and writing.
She moved from Japan to New York in 1958 and began exhibiting the large monochrome Infinity Net canvases that challenged prevailing expectations about the expressive gesture. Her work of the following years intersected with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, Feminist art and institutional critique without settling inside any of them, and her circle included Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd. The Infinity Mirror Rooms that later brought her mass audiences depend on the presence of the viewer, who enters the work and becomes part of the reflected image.
Kusama's persistence was as notable as her invention. Her life spanned 97 years and her career more than seven decades, across which the way art was made, shown and received changed almost beyond recognition; her motifs were revisited and extended rather than merely repeated. Her exhibition history runs from the experimental galleries of 1960s New York to the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and museums across the world, while her imagery moved well beyond museum walls into fashion, design and popular culture.
Two exhibitions listed on her official site frame the moment of her death. 'KUSAMA's POP' is at the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo from 16 April to 30 August 2026, closing three days after the announcement, and a Yayoi Kusama exhibition opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 11 September 2026 and runs to 17 January 2027 — the first major museum presentation to open after her death.
The tribute that carried this news to subscribers came from Lougher Contemporary, the Bristol dealer in contemporary editions, which opened its remembrance with a line attributed to the artist: “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.”
