Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dies
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, known for her mirrored installations, bright colors and polka-dot motif, has died in Tokyo at the age of 97. According to The Guardian World, she died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo. The artist’s studio announced her death on its website.
In a statement, the studio said that Kusama continued painting until her final days and devoted her life to art. Her work encompassed visual art, performance, artistic prose and poetry. The studio also said it would continue to carry out the artist’s wishes and bring people hope and strength through art.
From New York to recognition
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in the Japanese city of Matsumoto. As a child, she began experiencing hallucinations, and drawing became a way for her to reproduce what she saw. During World War II, at the age of 13, she was involved in producing fabric for Japanese army parachutes.
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Later, Kusama studied traditional Japanese nihonga painting in Kyoto and moved to New York in 1958. There, she created the “infinity nets” series of canvases — large-scale fields with raised dots. In 2014, her work White No 28 sold at auction for $7.1 million; at the time, it was a record for a living female artist.
Mirrored rooms and pumpkins
In the 1960s, Kusama worked with sculpture, performance and installations. At the 1966 Venice Biennale, she presented Narcissus Garden without an invitation — a composition of 1,500 mirrored balls. The artist later developed the theme of infinity in mirrored rooms, which became some of her best-known works.
In 1977, Kusama voluntarily moved into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where art therapy classes were held. She worked every day in her own studio nearby. Recognition came to her later: in 1993, the artist created a mirrored room with small pumpkins for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her retrospectives were held, among other places, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London’s Tate Modern and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
