To the Very Last Dot

Yayoi Kusama, Spot On

Until 17 January 2027, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is hosting a major exhibition of Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist of polka dots, pumpkins and mirror rooms. Because she passed away less than a month before the opening, the retrospective has become the ultimate posthumous tribute.

The exhibition presents more than seventy years of her groundbreaking oeuvre, spanning a wide range of disciplines: painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, fashion, collage and happenings. It covers her entire career, from the early works she made in her hometown, through her pioneering experiments in New York, to recent pieces from Tokyo. Historical works are shown alongside pieces never before seen in Europe, and Kusama even created new works especially for the occasion.

Dots Against the Void

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in the Japanese Alps. As a child she already experienced visions: nets and dots spreading over everything around her. To keep them under control, she painted them. In 1958 she moved to New York, where she broke through with her Infinity Nets, large canvases filled with endlessly repeated loops of paint. These were followed by soft sculptures, naked polka-dot happenings and, from 1965 onwards, the first Infinity Mirror Rooms: mirrored spaces in which visitor, artwork and room merge into one another.

Narcissus

At the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, Kusama laid out 1,500 mirrored spheres on the lawn in front of the Italian pavilion and, like a street vendor, sold them to passers-by for two dollars apiece. This 'Narcissus Garden' already contained all the hallmarks of her later work. The reflective plastic spheres mirrored the viewer's own image, inviting self-reflection and even the dissolution of the self into the whole. The gesture was also an ironic wink at an art market she felt had become far too commercial.

The organisers made her stop, deeming it inappropriate to sell art as if it were hot dogs or ice cream. Her installation was, however, allowed to remain, even though she had not been officially invited to represent Japan. That would not happen until 1993.

Icon

In the early 1970s she returned to Japan. From 1977 she lived, by her own choice, in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, with her studio just around the corner, and continued to work tirelessly. Her fame, however, remained largely confined to avant-garde circles. The real turning point came in 1993, when she officially represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale, becoming the first woman to hold a solo exhibition in the Japanese pavilion.

Thanks to commercial collaborations with brands such as Louis Vuitton, and a major retrospective that toured Europe in 2011–2012, Kusama grew into an international phenomenon, as famous for her public persona as for her art. Her polka dots, pumpkins and mirrors became icons around the world, Instagram included.

Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August at the age of 97.

No beginning. No End.

The exhibition, curated by Leontine Coelewij, follows Kusama from her early work in Matsumoto through the New York avant-garde to her most recent paintings from Tokyo. Sixty years on, the work the artist donated to the museum in 1965 is back in the galleries: a rowing boat with oars, covered in white phallic protrusions, holding a pair of women's shoes and set in a room papered with black-and-white photographs of that same boat. Its title: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new mirror room with a title that is itself almost infinite: Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe. Speckled yellow tentacles snake through the space, and the mirrors do the rest. After a few seconds you can no longer tell where the room ends, which is exactly the point. Director Rein Wolfs sums it up: 'In her work, the distinction between yourself and the world around you disappears.'

For an artist who spent decades exploring pattern, identity and infinity, this mirror room is a more than fitting farewell.

Find out more at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Image: Infinity Mirrored Room – 'The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe', 2025. Mixed media, detail. Foto: Peter Tijhuis. © YAYOI KUSAMA

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