Yayoi Kusama grew up on a plant nursery and seed farm in the regional Japanese city of Matsumoto, where she revelled in the nature surrounding her. At about the age of ten, Kusama started visualising her experiences in drawings, initiating some of her most enduring artistic themes.

After briefly studying traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto during the late 1940s, Kusama returned to Matsumoto. She was inspired by international art trends and encouraged to pursue art through her correspondence with the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. During this time, Kusama produced experimental paintings in vast numbers that she exhibited in her home prefecture and Tokyo.

By the mid 1950s Kusama’s ambition had outgrown regional Japan and the possibilities on offer in postwar Tokyo. In November 1957 she left for the United States, with silk kimonos in her bags, American banknotes hidden in her clothing, and some two thousand drawings and paintings. Kusama arrived in Seattle, and within one month she presented her first solo US exhibition at Dusanne Gallery. Six months later, Kusama moved to New York to pursue her dream of international success.

Arriving in New York in 1958, Kusama visited the Empire State Building and looked down from its observation deck at Manhattan’s busy streets. In that moment she realised that to be recognised in New York, she must do something truly spectacular. Her first impression of the city was of ‘a fierce and violent place’, a ‘living hell’ that was extremely stressful. Despite these conditions, she persevered, determined to make a name for herself in the art world’s centre.

Using a repetitive creative process, Kusama painted large canvases that immerse both artist and viewer in an expansive monochromatic field. From 1963 she extended this interest in self-immersion, or ‘self-obliteration’, into three dimensions. For her Accumulation sculptures, Kusama covered furniture and found objects with phallus-like fabric forms, a style of sculpture that would continue over the coming decades.

In 1965 and 1966 Kusama presented her first infinity mirror rooms at New York’s Castellane Gallery. These installations, which immersed visitors in 360-degree reflections, took Kusama a step closer to realising her ambition of losing herself in endlessly proliferating space.

Kusama’s work undertook a major shift in the second half of the 1960s. Between 1967 and 1969 she presented roughly seventy-five ‘happenings’ – socially and politically charged events linked to the broader countercultural movements of the period, including sexual liberation and anti–Vietnam War protests. Most of Kusama’s happenings took place at prominent public locations throughout New York, including Central Park, Trinity Church and the Brooklyn Bridge. Participants in these public interventions were often naked, and Kusama – the self-professed ‘High Priestess of Polka Dots’ – would use her paintbrush to ‘obliterate’ their bodies with polka dots.

Kusama carefully documented this experimental period in her career. Happenings, film screenings and other ephemeral events were announced with press releases and captured in photographs. Her fashion designs of the period were similarly recorded in photo shoots and advertisements for her fashions were published in men’s magazines. Such documents form an important part of the artist’s personal archive.

Kusama regularly wore outfits of her own design, including a pink-and-white tunic dress, during the many happenings and photo shoots she staged in the late 1960s. Beyond her personal wardrobe, Kusama crafted radical garments that aligned with the spirit of the sexual liberation movement. Some designs featured her handpainted net motif while others had strategically placed holes that revealed parts of the wearer’s naked body.

To extend the reach of her fashion designs beyond the art world and make them commercially viable, she established Kusama Fashion Company in 1969. The same year, she launched a ready-to-wear collection. With garments that ranged from relatively conventional styles to radical designs, Kusama’s clothes were stocked by retailers in New York and sold at her own boutique on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Eighth Street.

In 1973 Kusama moved back to Japan after nearly sixteen years living in the United States. Around this time, she experienced the death of several significant people in her life, including her father in 1974. A period of introspection and psychological breakdowns followed, leading Kusama to choose, in 1977, to live with regular access to psychiatric care. She eventually established a separate studio, but for a time her working space was limited, so she began to create small-scale collages. These detailed and intimate works combine cut-out photographs and illustrations, often with insect, marine or botanical motifs and her characteristic drawn and painted nets, webs and dots.

Kusama first saw a pumpkin as a primary-school student while visiting a seed-harvesting nursery with her grandfather. Among yellow flowering vines, she discovered a pumpkin the size of a man’s head and, as she went to pluck it, it began to speak to her in an animated manner. Enchanted by its charming nature, the young Kusama adopted the pumpkin as a recurring motif in her art.

Kusama created her first pumpkin painting as a teenager in 1946. She likened the ritual of painting pumpkins to Zen meditation: ‘I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else, and concentrate my mind entirely on the form before me.’

In the late 1970s Kusama returned to one of the most nurturing and wondrous life forms of her childhood. Initially painting yellow-and-black or black-and-white dotted pumpkins, she has seamlessly transformed the image of the pumpkin into sculptures, infinity mirror rooms and a multitude of commercial products, elevating it to one of the most recognised icons of contemporary art worldwide.

In 1973 Kusama returned permanently to Japan where, after some years of isolation and introversion, she began to exhibit again. She was represented in a major survey of contemporary Japanese art in 1981 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, cementing her place within the national art scene. It was not long until Kusama returned to the world stage. In 1989 her first international retrospective exhibition was staged at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, and in 1993 she was the first solo contemporary artist to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.

In work produced during these final decades of the twentieth century, the artist simultaneously looks back at the past and towards the future. Her soft botanical sculptures and repetitive multi-panel paintings recall her Accumulations and Infinity Nets of the 1950s and 1960s, while also broadening her artistic exploration of natural and cosmic worlds. Kusama’s expanded vision was realised anew in Dots Obsession, 1996, an environment populated with polka-dotted inflatables. This work has since been realised in many variations, incorporating mirrors since 1998. This marked an evolution in the artist’s groundbreaking infinity mirror rooms of the 1960s.

Since 2000 Yayoi Kusama has become one of the world’s most recognised artists. From major international survey exhibitions and monumental sculptures installed in public spaces to widespread recognition of her signature motifs and striking visual identity (most notably, her red wig), Kusama has become a key figure in popular culture. In 2016 she was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world.

In the twenty-first century, Kusama’s rise has been amplified by the power of social media. Images of the artist’s infinity mirror rooms and collaborations with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton have introduced an audience of many millions to her art.

Despite her larger-than-life status, Kusama remains committed to making art that is deeply personal. Whether in poetry, paintings or large site-specific installations or infinity mirror rooms, Kusama expresses reasons for hope in the face of existential finitude. Her creativity is her lifeline.

In 2002 Kusama published her autobiography, in which she wrote:

What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire. It would be futile and meaningless to focus on the shrinking time-frame before me, or to think of my limitations. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will live forever.

Kusama’s vision continues to expand, whether painting in solitude or developing new work, site-specific installations and mirror rooms.

A new infinity mirror room is presented in this exhibition for the first time alongside a selection of recent paintings created since 2021. During this time, Kusama’s mobility has decreased and her living space has become her working space. Consequently, the size of her canvases has reduced. These paintings are filled with imagery drawn from nature and childhood memories, as well as other ideas that have preoccupied the artist since her earliest years in Matsumoto. Kusama’s ongoing, prolific output is a testament to her undiminished drive to create art.