On the water mirror of a cultural center in Brumadinho, an open-air museum complex about 60 kilometers from Belo Horizonte in southeastern Brazil, 750 stainless steel spheres drift and regroup with the wind, reflecting the sky of Minas Gerais and the face of every visitor who leans over them. The installation Narcissus Garden, part of the Inhotim Institute, is the best known work in Brazil by Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who died in a Tokyo hospital at 97.
Her death was confirmed in a statement from Kusama's company, which said it occurred on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital, according to the BBC. "She continued painting until her last days, never setting down her brush, and continued exploring eternal love and the eternal soul," the statement said, pledging to carry forward the artist's wishes and keep bringing hope to people around the world through art.
From rural Japan to the New York avant-garde
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in central Japan, Kusama turned into art the hallucinations that had visited her since childhood: fields of repeating polka dots, giant pumpkins, lights multiplying toward infinity. Still young, she rejected an arranged marriage and moved to New York, where her paintings, sculptures and nude performances shocked her conservative family and stirred the male-dominated art scene of the 1960s, as the BBC recalls. It was there, in 1965, that her first infinity mirror rooms appeared, installations in which mirrors and lights create seemingly endless spaces.
Recognition came late. According to the BBC, Kusama watched male contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras show work inspired by her ideas in more prestigious galleries, and she returned to Japan in 1973 disheartened. Four years later she admitted herself voluntarily to a psychiatric hospital, Brazil's Jornal Nacional reported: a protected environment, chosen among institutions interested in art therapy, where she would live and create for the rest of her life, according to the BBC. Her consecration arrived slowly. In 1993 she became the first Japanese artist to represent her country with a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale, 27 years after appearing at the event uninvited and scattering 1,500 mirrored balls across the floor. In her eighties and nineties she became a global phenomenon, with works fetching some of the highest prices ever paid for a female artist.
A lasting bond with Brazil
Kusama built a rare, permanent bond with Brazil. Between 2013 and 2014, the retrospective Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession, with about one hundred works, toured the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo and the Banco do Brasil cultural centers in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, drawing more than 1.7 million visitors, according to Jornal Nacional. Since 2023, Inhotim has kept a permanent gallery dedicated to her, with two immersive installations: I'm Here, But Nothing, a domestic room covered by more than 20,000 fluorescent dots, and Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, where lanterns and mirrors produce a feeling of infinity. The collection also includes Narcissus Garden and its 750 floating spheres.
"We lost one of the most important artists in contemporary art, a person with a very long trajectory who created and left a legacy. I believe that Inhotim having these three works on permanent display today is also a way of keeping that legacy alive," Lucas Menezes, an Inhotim curator, told Jornal Nacional.
Kusama used to say she would do everything possible to bring love to humanity and that, even after her death, she wanted people to understand the purpose of her creations, her hope and her passion for art. In Brumadinho, the steel spheres still float on the water mirror, pushed by the wind, giving back to each passerby their own reflected face, as if the world, now without her, still fit inside every dot.