Image: Yayoi Kusama creating the My Eternal Soul series in her studio, 2014. © YAYOI KUSAMA
Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97. David Zwirner, which has represented her since 2013, has published an In Memoriam notice mourning her loss, but the gallery gives no date or place of death. Those come from the artist’s own studio, whose statement of 27 August 2026, signed by Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc., says she died at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 — thirteen days before the news was made public. Both accounts agree that she worked to the end; the studio says she continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush.
Kusama devoted herself to a life as an avant-garde artist, working primarily in the visual arts while extending her practice into performance, novels and poetry. Born in Matsumoto in 1929, she held her first solo show there in 1952 and established herself in New York in the mid-1960s through performances, happenings, events and exhibitions. Her work influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art and performance art, and her large-scale installations, in the gallery’s phrase, pioneered what is now called experiential art.
Wider recognition came in 1989 with solo shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. She represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1998 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York co-organised ‘Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968’, which travelled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. A retrospective of 2011–12 travelled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The scale of her audiences had few modern parallels. Between 2012 and 2015 three major solo presentations toured simultaneously through Japan, Asia and Central and South America; one of them, ‘Infinite Obsession’, drew close to two million visitors across MALBA–Fundación Costantini in Buenos Aires and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro before opening at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She was named to TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016. From 2017 to 2019 the survey ‘Infinity Mirrors’ travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Seattle Art Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
‘KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature’ was shown at The New York Botanical Garden in 2021, and in 2023 her commissioned mosaic ‘A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe’ (2022) went on permanent view at Grand Central’s Madison Concourse. ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love’ ran at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art across 2023 and 2024, followed by a comprehensive retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2024 and 2025. A travelling European exhibition opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel in 2025, the first Kusama retrospective in Switzerland, which the gallery’s captions date to 2025–26.
The last major exhibition to open in her lifetime was the career retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which gathered more than 300 works, from childhood drawings onwards, and closed on 2 August 2026; the museum announced that it had become the most successful exhibition in its history. That show travels to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, opening 11 September 2026 and running to 17 January 2027 — the first major museum presentation to open after her death. David Zwirner has mounted six solo exhibitions of her work at its New York galleries, in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023. The dealer recalls that her last visit to New York, in 2013, opened the first of them, and calls her, at the time of her death, “without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world”.
