Acclaimed Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97, her official website has announced.
A statement published on Thursday morning read: "It is with profound sorrow that the passing of Yayoi Kusama at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97.
"Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction and poetry."
One of the world's most recognisable artists, Kusama worked primarily in sculpture and installation and was one of the most significant creatives to emerge from Japan. One of her paintings fetched about $10.5 million at auction in 2022, making her works some of the highest-earning in the world for a female artist.
During her eight-decade career, she influenced creatives, including American pop artists Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan, and started creating art at a young age. She used drawing and painting to cope with the visual and auditory hallucinations she experienced. The dots that would become her defining style were representations of her childhood hallucinations, where vivid patterns and polka dots obscured her vision.
Kusama used such dots to decorate large-scale pumpkin sculptures and as points of light filling her Infinity Mirror Rooms, designed to appear endless.
Yayoi Kusama's work in the Middle East
Kusama's works have been broadly exhibited in the Middle East, including several installations in the UAE. In 2014, Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life (2011) was included in the Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection exhibition shown at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. Her works remain in the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection.
Two years later, in 2016, the Sharjah Art Foundation displayed Yayoi Kusama: Dot Obsessions, a retrospective exhibition dedicated to her paintings, works on paper, sculptures and interactive installations. Those included The Obliteration Room (2002), an all-white room filled with colourful stickers.
Her works have also been shown at Abu Dhabi Art and Art Dubai. The public can currently see Kusama’s Original Infinity Nets (2000) at Opera Gallery, Dubai, as part of its Summer Vibes exhibition, which runs until August 31.
Elsewhere in the region, her mirrored infinity room was displayed at the Maraya Concert Hall in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, in 2020. Called the Brilliance of the Souls, the immersive installation marked her debut in the kingdom. It was also displayed at Noor Riyadh in 2021.
In 2022, she brought her My Soul Blooms Forever outdoor exhibition to the grounds of the Museum of Islamic Art Park and Al Riwaq in Doha.
Fashion meets art
Kusama’s distinctive personal look evolved in the 1960s after moving to New York, where she quickly earned a reputation for not only painting polka dots on canvases and the human body, but for dressing in eccentric clashes of patterns and dots. She later added brightly coloured wigs to complete her transformation into her own living canvas.
In the late 1960s, she founded the Kusama Fashion Company, selling provocative clothing to challenge conventional boundaries. That was soon followed by her Nude Fashion Company, creating handmade and hand-painted clothing to transform the wearer into a piece of living artwork.
Her most famous relationship with fashion, however, was with French luxury house Louis Vuitton.
In 2012, then-artistic director of women's wear Marc Jacobs invited her to collaborate on a collection featuring her signature dots and pumpkins across handbags, including the Neverfull, Speedy and the Papillon. The collection also included luggage, clothing and accessories.
This partnership was revived in January 2023, under Nicolas Ghesquiere, with Kusama reworking the famous house monogram and installing a giant inflatable version of herself on the exterior of its Champs-Elysees flagship store. She also repainted the exterior of its Parisian headquarters in giant dots, which continued across the pavement, and installed a giant sculpture of herself on the street, turning the area into an outdoor art space.
A collaborative book, called Yayoi Kusama X Louis Vuitton: Creating Infinity, was released by Rizzoli in October the same year, itself packaged in an outsized, foam polka dot.
In October 2018, Kusama worked with the Museum of Modern Art in New York on a collection of limited-edition skateboards. In 2011, she collaborated with beauty brand Lancome on a series of six limited-edition Lancome Juicy Tubes lip glosses, which she decorated with drawings of butterflies, tulips, jellyfish and dots.
