Yayoi Kusama: the works that made the "polka dot" artist a global phenomenon traduzido por: OPENROUTER

Yayoi Kusama has died at the age of 97 in a Tokyo hospital. The death occurred on August 14, but was only announced this Wednesday (26) by the foundation and museum that bear the artist's name. According to the David Zwirner gallery, which represented her, the cause was multiple organ failure.

Until her death, Kusama was regarded as the most commercially successful living artist in the world. Over nearly eight decades of work, she moved through painting, sculpture, performance, cinema, fashion, poetry and fiction, always drawing from the same repertoire of forms: the dot, the net, repetition and the mirror.

Revisit below the works and contributions that made her an unavoidable name in contemporary art!

From childhood hallucinations to the "polka dots"

Born in Matsumoto, in the Japanese countryside, in 1929, Kusama was the daughter of a prosperous family of merchants.

(Joe Schildhorn/Divulgação)

She began drawing as a child, during the same period she started to have hallucinations: the flowers she saw seemed to multiply, come to life and speak to her. Since then, she lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder and reported, in several interviews, physical and psychological abuse suffered at home.

The dot — the "polka dot" that would become her signature — was born from that experience. It was not decoration, but a method: by covering surfaces, bodies and projects with repeated patterns, Kusama staged what she called "self-obliteration", the dissolution of the individual into an infinite field. It was this transposition of a symptom into a visual language that sustained her entire body of work.

Infinity Nets: the paintings that launched her in New York

At 27, in 1957, Kusama moved to New York, encouraged by American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. There, she developed the "Infinity Nets" series, nearly monochromatic canvases, many of them white, covered by thousands of curved, repeated brushstrokes, with no defined center or edge.

(Heather Sten/Divulgação)

The paintings placed her in the New York avant-garde circuit, alongside names such as Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell. Her work influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg — recognition that, at the time, did not translate into equivalent institutional prestige, in a milieu dominated by male artists.

Performance, body and antiwar activism

In the second half of the 1960s, Kusama took the dots off the canvas. She organized happenings (performance art) in public spaces in New York, in which nude bodies were painted with polka dots, and used these actions as a protest against the Vietnam War. Her antiwar activism dated back to when she was 16, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(Luca Girardini/Divulgação)

In 1966, she presented "Narcissus Garden" at the Venice Biennale: hundreds of stainless steel spheres scattered on the ground, which the artist even offered for sale on site. It was a critique of narcissism and the commodification of art. In 1993, she would return to the Biennale as Japan's official representative.

Mirror rooms and pumpkins

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and, four years later, voluntarily checked into a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she lived for decades, working in a nearby studio. It was in the late 1980s that her work went through a major critical reassessment in the West.

Yayoi Kusama, I’m Here, But Nothing (2000), obra da Yayoi Kusama. (Daniel Mansur/Divulgação)

From this mature phase come her most popular works: the "Infinity Mirror Rooms", projects lined with mirrors and points of light that multiply the visitor to infinity, and the pumpkins — sculptures with dotted surfaces, such as the one installed on the island of Naoshima, in Japan. The mirror rooms drew millions of people to museums and became one of the most photographed phenomena in contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama in Brazil

The artist's debut in Brazil was with "Infinite Obsession", produced by the Tomie Ohtake Institute and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith and Frances Morris. The show brought together around 100 works made between 1949 and 2012, including paintings, sculptures, videos, works on paper and installations.

Yayoi Kusama, I’m Here, But Nothing (2000), obra da Yayoi Kusama. (Daniel Mansur/Divulgação)

The exhibition ran at the CCBB in Rio de Janeiro between October 2013 and January 2014, welcomed 750,000 visitors and even had late-night sessions due to demand. It then moved on to the CCBB in Brasília and to the Tomie Ohtake Institute, in São Paulo. The Inhotim Institute, in Brumadinho (MG), also houses works by the artist in its collection, among them a version of "Narcissus Garden".

Yayoi Kusama's Legacy

Parte do sucesso da nova campanha da Louis Vuitton, que reimagina peças clássicas da marca sob o olhar de Yayoi Kusama, está na adesão de supermodelos como Bella Hadid, Gisele Bündchen e Anok Yai. (Louis Vuitton/Divulgação)

In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, dedicated exclusively to her work. In recent years, the polka dots have migrated to phone cases, lipsticks and Louis Vuitton collections, achieving a pop reach that is rare for a museum artist.

In the statement announcing her death, the foundation said that Kusama painted until her final days, never abandoning the arts, and remained faithful to the idea that love can save the world.

CASACOR Publisher is an exclusive content-creating agent, developed by the CASACOR Technology team based on the knowledge base of casacor.com.br. This text was edited by Yeska Coelho.

traduzido por: OPENROUTER