Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan, the youngest of four children in a family whose livelihood was rooted in plant nurseries and seed farming. She studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts between 1948 and 1951 before relocating to New York in the late 1950s, where she developed the body of work that would define her international reputation. Since 1977, she has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, maintaining a studio nearby — an arrangement that has sustained one of the most prolific and uninterrupted practices in contemporary art.

Kusama's work is organized around a set of obsessions that have remained consistent across more than seven decades: repetition, accumulation, self-obliteration, and the dissolution of the boundary between self and cosmos. Her Infinity Net paintings, begun in 1959, established her mature visual language through dense, monochromatic fields of looping brushwork that entered into direct dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and early Minimalism. Accumulation No. 1 (1962), a chair encrusted with stuffed sewn forms, extended this logic into three dimensions, transforming a domestic object through compulsive repetition. Narcissus Garden (1966), first presented at the Venice Biennale, deployed hundreds of mirrored stainless-steel spheres to address spectatorship, self-image, and the commodification of art. Her first major Infinity Mirror Room, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (1965), introduced the immersive environment as a defining form in her practice — a form she has continued to develop, most recently in works such as Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), which uses LED technology to renew the experience of infinite space. The Obliteration Room (2002–present) turns this impulse collective, inviting visitors to cover an entirely white domestic interior with colored adhesive dots until the room itself disappears. Her large Pumpkin sculptures, begun in the 1990s in painted fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and the ongoing My Eternal Soul painting series, begun in 2009, demonstrate the sustained intensity of her late career.

Kusama is represented by David Zwirner in New York, with whom she has exhibited since 2013 — shows including I Who Have Arrived in Heaven (2013) and Give Me Love (2015) — and by Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo and across Asia, where Every Day I Pray for Love was presented in Singapore in 2024. Her institutional presence spans MoMA in New York and the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, as well as solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and many others across Europe, Asia, and Australia. In October 2025, Moderna Museet in Stockholm opens Yayoi Kusama – In Infinity, described as the first major Scandinavian retrospective of her career, running through January 2028.