TOKYO — Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who splashed her signature polka dots on paintings, sculptures and museum installations around the world, has died, her company said Thursday. She was 97.
Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, her company, Yayoi Kusama Studio, said in a statement.
Kusama, one of Japan’s most respected contemporary artists, was widely exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Repetitive motifs were her trademark, in various shapes, resembling netting, swirls or worms, but most often dots, dancing proudly on her canvases, or as sparkling balls or dots of light in her installations, in all their vibrant, psychedelic glory.
In 2017, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the first U.S. museum survey of the 88-year-old Tokyo artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad. The rooms had Infinity Mirror Rooms had generated “Hamilton”-scale hype.
Kusama told The Times, simply: “I believe that people are attracted by the infinite mysterious beauty that the artwork has. I am also attracted.”
Kusama, known for her fiery red wig, lived by choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital for decades. She had opened her own museum in Tokyo yet remained very private, granting limited interviews.
Kusama had hallucinations as a child that she channeled into drawings. She became a boundary-pushing artist on New York’s avant-garde scene int he 1960s, exhibiting with Andy Warhol, sculptor Claes Oldenburg and other greats. After having a breakdown in the late 1960s, she moved back to Japan permanently in 1973, where she focused on painting sculpture, novel-writing and collages.
Times staff writer Deborah Vankin contributed to this report.
The post Yayoi Kusama, who splashed polka dots across the art world, dies at 97 appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
