Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97 years old. Her studio and gallery David Zwirner confirmed the death publicly Thursday August 26.
The cause was multiple organ failure. She had painted until her final days, never setting aside her brush, her studio said.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into a middle-class family that wanted her to get married and wear kimonos rather than buy paints and brushes.
She chose art and then chose America. She arrived in New York in the late 1950s, during the era of action painting, when nobody was interested in dots, and spent years in poverty and obscurity, creating net paintings, soft sculptures and the first of her Infinity Mirror Rooms while her male contemporaries received the credit and the gallery shows.
"I am so afraid, all the time, of everything," she said in one interview. In another she declared herself "an artistic revolutionary." Both were true simultaneously.
The hallucinations that defined her work began in childhood, flashes of light, fields of dots, flowers that spoke to her. Rather than hide them she painted them, obsessively and endlessly, until the dots covered everything: the canvases, the sculptures, the rooms, and eventually the artist herself. "I still see hallucinations even now," she told reporters in 2017. She was 88 years old.
Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, the first built in 1965, became some of the most visited art installations in the world, drawing hours-long lines at the Hirshhorn, the Tate Modern, the Broad and dozens of museums across the planet.
In 2012 and again in 2023 she collaborated with Louis Vuitton, polka-dotting the fashion house's storefronts and products until the partnership between art and commerce became its own kind of infinity.
Her works sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction. The spotted pumpkins on Naoshima island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea have become one of the most photographed objects in the country.
She spent the final decades of her life voluntarily residing in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, walking across the street to her studio every day to paint. "I will keep on making my art until the day I die," she said. "And even after I die, my spirit will keep creating new art." She kept that promise. Her studio confirmed she painted until the end.