Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose hypnotic polka dots, mirrored installations and visions of infinity made her one of the world’s most recognisable contemporary artists, has died aged 97.
Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August 2026, according to a statement published by Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio on 27 August. The announcement said she had continued painting until her final days.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began making art as a child, when she experienced visions and hallucinations that informed the dots and repeating nets that would become central to her visual language. She moved to the United States in 1957 and became a prominent figure in New York’s post-war avant-garde, producing her Infinity Nets, soft sculptures and immersive installations using mirrors and lights.
Her practice was strikingly difficult to contain within a single movement. Alongside painting and sculpture, Kusama staged body-painting events, fashion shows and anti-war happenings, while also working in film and later publishing fiction and poetry. She described her obsessive use of repetition and proliferation through the idea of “self-obliteration”, transforming private psychological experiences into environments that appeared to extend endlessly beyond the individual.
In later decades, her Infinity Mirror Rooms and monumental pumpkins brought her extraordinary popular recognition. A 2024–25 exhibition at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria attracted more than 570,000 visitors, setting an attendance record for the museum.
Her death closes a career spanning more than seven decades, but Kusama’s strange, ecstatic universe of dots, reflections and repetition has permanently altered the visual language of contemporary art.
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