Art · 21st century
1929–2026 · Japanese
Polka dots, Infinity Nets and mirrored installation
Yayoi Kusama covered the world in dots. Driven since childhood by hallucinations of nets and spots spreading over every surface, she made obsessive net paintings, soft sculptures bristling with stuffed phalluses, and mirrored rooms that repeat a few lights into infinity. For the last half-century of her life she lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital and walked to her studio across the road to work every day.
A mirrored room filled with hundreds of red-spotted white stuffed protrusions growing from the floor, the first of its kind (1965)
Various collections
The work that began the Infinity Mirror Rooms
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Fifteen hundred mirrored plastic globes strewn on a lawn outside the Italian pavilion, sold to passers-by for two dollars each until the organisers stopped her (1966)
Venice Biennale (later restaged worldwide)
An uninvited intervention, with a sign reading 'Your Narcissium for Sale'
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A giant yellow spotted gourd on a pier on a Japanese art island, washed into the sea by a typhoon in 2021 and restored (1994)
Naoshima, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan
The Yellow Pumpkin at Benesse Art Site Naoshima
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A white room that visitors gradually bury in coloured dot stickers until nothing white remains (2002)
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (and touring)
The Obliteration Room, originally made with children in Brisbane
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Vast monochrome canvases of endlessly repeated loops, begun in New York in the late 1950s (1959)
Various collections
The Infinity Nets, her first New York breakthrough
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A rowing boat and oars entirely covered in stuffed white protrusions, shown against wallpaper repeating its own photograph (1963)
Various collections
The installation whose repeated wallpaper image anticipated Warhol's Cow Wallpaper
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia