Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 97

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 97. Her studio and the David Zwirner gallery announced the news only on 26 August.

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto and began to draw as a child, as a way of coping with hallucinations and violence at home. She studied Nihonga at the Kyoto school of arts, and in 1958, after corresponding with Georgia O'Keeffe, left for New York to study at the Art Students League and to work side by side with Eva Hesse and Donald Judd. In 1959 she made her debut with the Infinity Nets series at the Brata gallery, followed by Accumulation, furniture covered in phallic forms, and the first Infinity Room at the Castellane gallery.

Then came anti-war activism with nude happenings, a demonstration outside the New York Stock Exchange in 1968 and Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead a year later, by the fountain of the MoMA sculpture garden, with participants painted in polka dots.

In 1973 the artist returned to Japan and voluntarily settled in a Tokyo psychiatric clinic, where she remained until her death, going out every day to work in a studio nearby. In 1966 she had been expelled from the Venice Biennale for her guerrilla installation Narcissus Garden, in which she sold mirrored spheres straight from the lawn. In 1993 she officially represented Japan at the Biennale once more.

In 2023 she publicly apologised for racist remarks about Black people in her 2002 autobiography. Kusama's retrospective at the Ludwig in Cologne became the best-attended in the museum's entire history.

The artist's last words about herself, relayed by the studio: she wrote until her final days, exploring eternal love and the eternal soul