Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, best known for her colorful, polka-dot-covered artwork and sculptures, has died. She was 97.
Kusama’s official website announced her death on Thursday, saying in a statement that the artist had died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14. It did not specify a cause of death.
“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,” the statement read.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama experienced visions and hallucinations from a young age that would later become central to her art.
Over the years, Kusama’s body of work grew to include the Infinity Mirror Rooms and pumpkin sculptures that helped make her one of the world’s most recognizable contemporary artists.
Kusama began exhibiting her work in Japan in the ’50s, before moving to New York in 1957, where she quickly became part of the city’s avant-garde scene. There, at her first solo exhibition, Kusama debuted a series of paintings that would later be known as “Infinity Nets.”
In a 1961 article, Kusama described working “as much as fifty to sixty hours at a stretch,” becoming “under the spell of the accumulation and repetition” in the “nets” of her art, per M+ Magazine, the digital publication of Hong Kong’s M+ contemporary-art museum.
Kusama’s tireless approach to making art continued throughout her life.
She voluntarily checked into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo around 1977 and lived there until her death. Even in her final decades, she kept creating new work.
Kusama said in a 2014 interview with Sleek Magazine that making art had helped her through life’s hardships and psychological struggles.
“Every day I am creating a new world by making artworks. I wake up early in the morning and stay up late at night, sometimes until 3 a.m., just to make art. I am fighting for my life and don’t take any rest,” she said.
Reflecting on her difficult path as an artist in a 2020 interview with Phaidon, Kusama said she still felt she had to do her “very best” because the time she has left “won’t be long.”
“But I kept at it and I am now at an age that I never imagined I would reach,” Kusama said.
In 2023, Kusama told The Art Newspaper that she was still painting every day, and wanted to “continue creating a world in awe of life.”
That same year, Kusama said that age had not changed her creative drive, as she saw no difference between her earlier work and the art she was making later in life.
“I never run out of ideas so I shall continue to show new things,” she told Wallpaper. “I take in everything I’m interested in. I desire to create ever more original works.”
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