There were dots everywhere: on her dress, on the floor, on the things she was carrying, all over the house, on the ceiling. Yayoi Kusama had seen them since she was a girl, in the hallucinations that stayed with her throughout her life, and she spent more than eight decades painting them, until the dots became her signature. The Japanese artist died at 97 on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital. Her death was announced on August 26 in a joint statement from the museum and the foundation that bear her name. The cause was not disclosed.
"Over the course of an extraordinary life entirely devoted to artistic creation, Kusama built an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist, whose creative practice spanned visual arts, performance, fiction and poetry," reads the text published on the artist's official website, according to G1. "She continued to paint until her last days, never letting go of the brush, and kept exploring endless love and the eternal soul." The museum and the foundation also said, according to Folha de S.Paulo, that they will carry on Kusama's wishes and, through art, bring hope and strength to people.
From Japan to New York, and back
Born in 1929, the youngest child of a wealthy family, Kusama began creating her polka dot and net patterns at age ten, an early start to what would become her trademark, Folha reports. Frustrated with what she saw as the suffocating character of Japanese society, she left for New York at 27 and quickly gained notoriety there with paintings inspired by the hallucinations of flashing lights, dots and flowers she had experienced since childhood, according to G1. In the 1960s she wrote, took part in anti-war protests and, by some accounts, influenced artists such as Andy Warhol.
The same city that made her famous, she used to say, gave her neuroses. Kusama spoke openly about her mental health and, a few years after returning to Japan, voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital around 1977. She lived there for decades, driven by car every morning to her nearby studio, where she kept working. Out of that routine came the obsessive paintings covered in dots, the pumpkin motifs and installations such as The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, the work she posed inside for a photograph in 2013. The vivid red wig and the daring polka dot outfits, Folha notes, completed the image of an artist whose exuberant work was the expression of a long battle with mental illness.
"I still have hallucinations to this day," she said in 2017. "Dots fly off everywhere, onto my dress, the floor, the things I am carrying, all over the house, the ceiling. And I paint them."
The dots that flew everywhere are staying put now. They keep covering canvases, pumpkins and entire rooms in museums and collections around the world, endless, just as she always saw them.