Yayoi Kusama dies aged 97
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, known for her colourful polka dot artworks, has passed away in Tokyo from multiple organ failure at the age of 97.
In a statement, Kusama's gallery, David Zwirner, announced that she died at a Tokyo hospital on 14 August.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama was one of the best-known Japanese artists working today. After holding solo shows in Japan in the 1950s, her work evolved in New York in the 1960s, where she created performance art pieces and took part in exhibitions.
In 1989, Kusama held solo shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and her museum shows have drawn record crowds since the late 1990s, with a survey in 2014 based on museum attendance naming her the world's most popular artist.
In 2016, she made TIME Magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People.
The artist became famous for her colourful polka dot paintings and sculptures, which include a gigantic polka dot pumpkin that is installed on a pier on Naoshima Island, Japan.
She is also known for her Infinity Mirror Rooms, immersive artworks in which the visitors step inside rooms that are lined with mirrors and lit to create a feeling of infinite space.
These have become immensely popular in the age of Instagram, with visitors often queuing to see them.
Kusama has also frequently collaborated with brands, including luxury brand Louis Vuitton, which a few years ago overhauled its stores with her polka dots and created lifelike animatronics of her for its windows.
Her work often interacted with the built environment, including an installation in a hurricane-damaged train garage on New York's Rockaway peninsula that she filled with 1,500 mirrored balls.
While her shows travelled across the globe, the artist herself, who suffered from hallucinations throughout her life, had lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since checking into it in 1977.
In a statement, her studio, Yayoi Kusama Inc, said the artist continued working up until her death.
"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," the statement said.
"She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul."
In 2024, Kusama created her largest-ever permanent sculpture, Infinite Accumulation, a series of connected metallic spheres located by the Elizabeth Line entrance of London's Liverpool Street Station.
The main image is courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.
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