|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Following the death of the Japanese artist at 97, her final major retrospective in Amsterdam takes on a different meaning, offering a moment to consider the universe she created and the legacy she leaves behind.
There is something different about entering a Yayoi Kusama installation now.
The dots remain. The mirrors still multiply the body. The pumpkins retain their unmistakable forms, and the patterns continue across surfaces and spaces with the same relentless rhythm that has defined Kusama’s visual language for decades.
But one thing has changed.
Yayoi Kusama is no longer here.
The Japanese artist died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97, leaving behind a body of work that stretches from her earliest drawings to the immersive environments that eventually made her one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary art. Her death has inevitably changed the way her work is encountered, particularly as her final major retrospective opens at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
What was conceived as another chapter in a long and extraordinary career now carries the weight of a final encounter.
A World Seen Through Repetition
Kusama’s relationship with repetition began long before the polka dots became a global visual signature. From childhood, she experienced hallucinations involving patterns, dots, flowers and nets, translating these experiences into drawings and paintings as a way of externalising what she saw.
That history matters because it changes the way her work can be understood. The dots were never simply a decorative device, just as the repetition was never merely a recognisable aesthetic. They became a method through which Kusama could explore the boundaries between herself and the world around her.
She spent a lifetime taking that process further.
A single mark became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands. A room became a field of reflections. The individual object became part of an environment in which the distinction between one thing and another began to disappear.
Repetition became a language for infinity.
From Japan to New York
Kusama left Japan for New York in 1957, entering an artistic environment that would profoundly shape the next stage of her career. There she developed her Infinity Net paintings and moved increasingly between painting, sculpture, performance and installation.
Her work challenged the boundaries separating disciplines. Sculpture became environment, performance became participation, and the viewer increasingly became part of the work rather than an observer standing outside it.
The significance of that period extends beyond the individual works she produced. Kusama was developing an artistic language that could exist at different scales, from the intimate surface of a canvas to an entire room.
That ambition would eventually become central to the Infinity Mirror Rooms.
The Disappearance of the Self
Kusama’s work is often described through its most recognisable imagery, but beneath the dots and mirrors lies a more complicated preoccupation with identity.
Inside an Infinity Mirror Room, the viewer encounters an endless sequence of reflections. The body is repeated until it becomes difficult to determine where one reflection ends and another begins. The room appears to continue beyond its physical boundaries, creating the sensation that the individual has entered something much larger.
There is an inherent contradiction here.
Kusama became one of the most recognisable artists in the world while producing work that repeatedly questioned the boundaries of the individual. Her red hair, distinctive clothing, pumpkins, dots and mirrored environments became an unmistakable public identity.
The artist who explored self-obliteration ultimately became an icon of individuality.
That tension is one of the most interesting aspects of her legacy.
From Avant-Garde to Global Culture
Kusama’s journey from the avant-garde of 1960s New York to the world’s major museums and collections is equally remarkable. Her work moved beyond the traditional art world into fashion, popular culture and global commercial visibility, while retaining the visual language that had developed from deeply personal experiences.
The transition did not make the work less significant. Instead, it demonstrated the extraordinary portability of her ideas.
The dots could exist on a canvas, a sculpture, an installation or a commercial object. The mirrors could turn a museum room into an experience shared by thousands of visitors. Her pumpkins could move between intimate artworks and monumental public symbols.
Kusama created something rare: a visual language that could be immediately recognised without being completely separated from its conceptual origins.
The Final Encounter
The Stedelijk Museum’s retrospective now occupies a particularly poignant position in that story. Spanning more than seven decades of work, the exhibition brings together different periods of Kusama’s practice and places them within the context of a career that has now reached its physical conclusion.
The work itself, however, has not reached an ending.
That may be the most appropriate legacy for an artist whose practice was so deeply concerned with infinity.
Visitors will continue entering her mirrored rooms. They will continue seeing their reflections multiplied across infinite surfaces. They will continue encountering the dots, pumpkins and paintings that became part of the global visual imagination.
The artist is gone, but the system she created continues to operate.
Kusama spent her life asking where the individual ends and the universe begins. In death, that question takes on a new dimension. Her physical presence has disappeared, but the artistic universe she constructed remains capable of expanding through every new viewer who enters it.
Yayoi Kusama is gone. Her infinity is not.
