Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto City, Japan, and has become one of the most influential and widely exhibited artists in the world. From childhood, she experienced vivid hallucinations in which dots and nets proliferated endlessly across her visual field, and she channelled these visions into an art of obsessive repetition and cosmic scale that has spanned painting, sculpture, installation, film, literature, and fashion over seven decades.
In 1958, Kusama moved to New York, where she created her “Infinity Net” paintings — vast canvases covered with thousands of tiny, hand-painted loops in a single colour, their all-over repetition anticipating both Minimalism and the systematic approaches of later conceptual artists. Her “Accumulation” sculptures covered furniture and objects with phallic protrusions; her happenings and body-painting events placed her at the centre of the 1960s counterculture. Her Narcissus Garden at the 1966 Venice Biennale — 1,500 mirrored spheres offered for sale at $2 each — presciently critiqued the commercialization of art.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977, walking each day to her nearby studio to work. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms — enclosed chambers where mirrored walls multiply lights or objects into apparent endlessness — have drawn record-breaking crowds worldwide. At ninety-six, she continues to produce new work, and her polka-dotted pumpkins and immersive environments have made her art accessible to millions who might never enter a traditional gallery.