Image: David Benrimon Fine Art, New York
David Benrimon Fine Art has circulated a memorial notice for Yayoi Kusama, headed ‘In Memoriam: Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026)’, which states that the Japanese artist died in Tokyo at the age of 97. The gallery’s notice gives no date of death. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation announced on August 27, 2026 that Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, aged 97.
The gallery’s announcement presents the death as the loss of a major figure in postwar and contemporary art. It identifies Kusama’s signature visual language as including fields of repeated dots, pumpkin forms and mirror installations, and connects those works to her concept of “self-obliteration”—a term associated with her effort to dissolve the boundaries between individual identity and the surrounding environment.
According to the notice, Kusama emerged as a provocative presence in Manhattan’s mid-century art scene, where she challenged a predominantly male artistic establishment. It also characterizes her practice as deliberately expansive, spanning painting, performance and street-based happenings, fashion and monumental sculpture. The statement does not provide a detailed chronology of those activities or identify specific exhibitions, works or museum collections.
Kusama’s work has long been associated with repetition, infinity and psychological experience. Her dot patterns extend across paintings and three-dimensional forms, while her mirrored environments place viewers inside shifting fields of reflected light and space. Pumpkins became another recurring motif, appearing in both two-dimensional and sculptural works. The gallery notice describes these elements as part of an artistic language that turned intensely personal concerns into experiences shared by large audiences.
The announcement also emphasizes Kusama’s sustained working life, saying that she continued painting and creating until the end of her life. The foundation’s statement makes the same point, describing a career devoted to visual art, performance, fiction and poetry, and a belief that love can save the world. The gallery quotes a passage from her autobiography, ‘Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama’: “My revolution of the Self, which has been such an essential part of my life so far, is all about discovering death. My destiny is to make art for my own requiem: art which gives meaning to death, tracing the beauty of colours and space in the silence of death’s footsteps and the ‘nothingness’ it promises.”
David Benrimon Fine Art is a New York gallery at 41 East 57th Street, Second Floor, in the Fuller Building. Its notice links to the gallery’s Yayoi Kusama collection page, which is also where the gallery’s own artists index directs visitors, but announces no new exhibition, memorial event or public programme.
