Yayoi Kusama, best known around the world for her ‘infinity mirror room’ installations and psychedelic sculptures and paintings, has died at the age of 97. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, some 200 km north-west of Tokyo, to affluent parents who managed plant nurseries. She began making art as a child, when she experienced hallucinations of talking flowers and drew what was in her mind’s eye, and later studied the traditional technique of nihonga, in which finely ground pigments mixed with glue are painted on to paper or silk. In 1958 she moved to New York and fell in with minimalists including Donald Judd and Frank Stella, and began work on her ‘infinity net’ paintings, in which hundreds of impasto polka dots cover the canvas. Judd and Stella were early buyers of this series.
While recent work has brought her international fame, not least for how recognisable and selfie-friendly much of it is, her art has often had a radical edge. In the 1960s she staged performances on Wall Street and in front of the Statue of Liberty and MoMA in which participants were naked except for painted polka dots to protest against the Vietnam War. At the Venice Biennale in 1966 she presented Narcissus Garden, composed of some 1,500 reflective balls that she began to sell on site with the pitch, ‘Your narcissism for sale.’ In 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, she washed a ‘dirty’ Soviet flag with soap outside the UN building in New York.
In 1973, as her spectacles grew less effective in New York, and after the death of her close friend the artist Joseph Cornell, Kusama moved back to Japan. Four years later, after decades of struggling with mental health, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she decided to spend the rest of her life making art. She fell out of public view during the 1980s but in 1993 she returned to the Venice Biennale with Mirror Room (Pumpkin), in which black polka dots on a yellow background seemed to proliferate endlessly thanks to a two-square-metre mirrored cube in the middle of the room. In the 21st century public sculptures and ambitious ‘mirror rooms’, which she had begun designing in 1965, earned her a new generation of fans. A statement released by her company, Yayoi Kusama Inc., said that she ‘continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush’.
