And Then the Infinite Swallowed Yayoi Kusama...

 

Yayoi Kusama died, the girl of the dots. The Japanese artist whose entire life was an obsession with the infinite. Kusama was one of the most important figures in the art of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. She perfectly embodied obsession and repetition. Those two pillars sustained her extraordinary artistic vision. Dots, polka dots, nets, plant forms. Kusama sought the infinite in every work, the endless. She wanted to disappear and used her art to achieve it. She submerged herself and vanished inside her own creations. Her exhibitions were pure immersive art. Creating worked for her as therapy and, along the way, proved fundamental to the beginnings of minimalism and pop art. Warhol later adopted the obsession with repetition after encountering Kusama’s work up close. What for many seemed an almost pathological fixation, Yayoi transformed into a mass phenomenon. For her art there were no limits. From a young age she covered her room with dots and patterns. Later she invaded the walls of her parents’ house. Still later she painted the bodies of her friends. She seemed to want to cover the entire world with her art, yet her true aim was to dissolve into it.

By the sixties she was already exhibiting in New York. She covered entire rooms. Her work mixed immersion, performance and pop art. Behind those nets of dots lay a deep philosophy. They represented a disease that spread. They were at once an allegory of equality and a lesson in humility. We are all a tiny indistinguishable dot among millions. Not only the walls filled with dots and patterns. The furniture and every object in the space did too. During the famous Happenings in the New York lofts she covered the bodies of the participants with that compulsive series of dots. But the obsession and the work sessions of up to sixty hours straight left her exhausted in body and mind. She would begin painting as therapy and then fall into a long, draining trance that lasted many hours.

She returned to Japan in the seventies to isolate herself from everything. She lived for decades in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo by her own choice. Only from the nineties onward was her work rediscovered and revalued with a force it had never known before, in Japan as well as in Italy and the United States. A collaboration with Louis Vuitton returned her to the world’s spotlight and reaffirmed that her art is among the most admired on the planet. Nearly nine decades of creation in search of the infinite.

Yayoi Kusama left this world on August 14, 2026, at the age of ninety seven. She finally dissolved into the eternity and immensity of her own work.