The Lasting Legacy of Yayoi Kusama

Ellen Boonstra09/02/2026≫ Art≫ Event

The Lasting Legacy of Yayoi Kusama

A major retrospective at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum will open in the wake of the passing of one of the world’s most internationally recognized artists.

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam was already preparing a major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama when she died in Tokyo at the age of 97 on August 14. Originally conceived as a survey of her work, the exhibition has now become a posthumous presentation of Kusama’s art, offering a look back at a legendary artist whose distinctive style made her an icon far beyond the art world.

Yayoi Kusama with Yellow Tree / Living Room at the Aichi Triennale, 2010. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Few artists anywhere have achieved Kusama's level of global recognition. Her polka dots, pumpkins, and Infinity Mirror Rooms are instantly recognizable, appearing in fashion, design, popular culture, and social media. Yet the imagery she is best known for is only part of a much larger body of work. The exhibition at the Stedelijk traces that work from Kusama's childhood in Matsumoto to the final years of her life, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, fashion, and performance, with pieces made as early as 1939 and as recently as 2025.

Kusama began drawing and painting as a child in wartime and postwar Japan, building a visual world that was already deeply personal before she ever left the country. Decades later, after returning to Tokyo, she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital, an arrangement she kept from the 1970s onward while continuing to work from a nearby studio. That personal history, featured in the 2018 documentary Kusama: Infinity, has become closely tied to the public story of her art. The Stedelijk exhibition, however, keeps the focus on the work itself and how her ideas developed over time.

Yayoi Kusama around the age of ten, ca. 1939. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Dissatisfied with conventional approaches to art, Kusama began developing her own methods before moving to the United States in 1957. She eventually settled in New York, where she became part of the city’s avant-garde scene. There, she began producing the large Infinity Net paintings, built from countless small, repeated marks whose scale and density challenged the artistic conventions of the time.

Yayoi Kusama poses in Untitled (Dress) with her phallic sculptures in her New York studio, 1971. Photo: Tom Haar. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Those ideas soon moved beyond the canvas, as Kusama began turning everyday objects and spaces into rooms filled with multiplying reflections. This was a key turning point, leading to the immersive work she became known for. Her first Infinity Mirror Room appeared in 1965, combining mirrors with soft sculpture to create the feeling of an endless space. The exhibition at the Stedelijk traces six decades of artistic exploration and includes two mirror installations from 2025, showing how this approach continued to evolve.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart, 2025. Mirror-polished stainless steel with glass mirrors and colored acrylic, 300 × 300 × 300 cm, inside view. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Although the mirror rooms are hugely popular, they grew out of ideas Kusama had been developing for years: infinity, endless repetition, and the feeling of losing your sense of self. The mirrors reflect lights, objects, and visitors over and over, so when you stand inside one, it feels as though the space stretches on forever, with no clear beginning or end.

Her dot paintings address similar questions, just on canvas rather than in a room. For Kusama, a repeating pattern was never just about how it looked. It was a way of showing how one person connects to something much bigger than themselves: the universe as a whole.

Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, 2025. Mixed media, detail. Photo: Mark Niedermann. © YAYOI KUSAMA

These ideas also shaped her performances in the 1960s, in which she used body paint, nudity, and public events to push her art beyond the gallery. In Anatomic Explosion, a 1968 happening on the Brooklyn Bridge, painted bodies became part of the work, bringing Kusama’s art into the wider world.

Anatomic Explosion happening on the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, August 14, 1968. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. Photo: Shunk-Kender. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Her interest in fashion emerged during this period, as she created clothing and textiles and used them as extensions of her art, at a time when such crossovers between art, performance, and fashion were far from common.

Kusama's signature motifs continued to develop over the following decades, from the bold, patterned pumpkins that became some of her best-known works to the large paintings and sculptures she created in her later years, when she was well into her nineties and still experimenting with color, pattern, and repetition. Her 1991 Pumpkin in the exhibition is an example of her long-running interest in turning everyday objects into art.

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 1991. Acrylic on canvas, 91 × 116.7 cm. Collection of the artist.
© YAYOI KUSAMA

The retrospective also revisits Narcissus Garden, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1966, when hundreds of mirrored spheres reflected their surroundings and the people around them. Seen today, the work offers an early link to the immersive installations that would later define Kusama's reputation, showing how elements of her early practice would continue to appear in new forms.

Yayoi Kusama amid her installation Narcissus Garden at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Taken together, the works on view reveal an artist who returned to the same questions for over seventy years, while continually finding new ways to explore them. For visitors who know Kusama mainly through her pumpkins and mirror rooms, the retrospective offers a chance to discover the much broader scope of her work.

Yayoi Kusama will be on display at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from September 11, 2026, through January 17, 2027.