Yayoi Kusama dies at 97, weeks before Amsterdam show

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose polka dots, pumpkins and mirrored infinity rooms made her one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists, has died at the age of 97.

Her death comes just over two weeks before a major retrospective of her work opens at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, turning the show into a posthumous tribute.

From hallucinations to art
Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama began drawing as a child, channelling troubling visions and hallucinations into the repeated nets, dots and other forms that would define her work. She moved to New York in the late 1950s and became a central figure in the city’s avant-garde art scene.

She returned to Japan in 1973 and, in 1977, voluntarily took up residence in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she lived for the rest of her life while working daily in a studio nearby.

Amsterdam retrospective
The Stedelijk exhibition, which opens on September 11 and runs until January 17, is the final stop of a European tour that began at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel and passed through Cologne’s Museum Ludwig.

It brings together more than 300 works spanning over 70 years, including pieces never shown in Europe before and new installations made for the show.
“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush,” her studio said.