Yayoi Kusama: Self-Obliteration in the Vision of Infinity

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has opened a major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, bringing together more than seven decades of her work. After her death in Tokyo on August 14, aged 97, what was planned as a celebration of her work has become the first opportunity to look at the legacy of one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig, traces Kusama’s career from her early works in Matsumoto through her New York years and the work she continued to produce in Tokyo. It spans painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, fashion, happenings and other media, bringing together iconic works, historic pieces never before shown in Europe, and new works created especially for the exhibition.

Over the years, Kusama repeatedly returned to a small set of familiar images and ideas—dots, nets, repetition, mirrors, pumpkins, and flowers—continually finding new ways to use them. Dots spread across entire surfaces, nets covered canvases, everyday objects multiplied into the hundreds, and rooms opened into seemingly endless spaces. What makes her work so compelling is the way these simple elements take on different forms and meanings from one work to the next. Taken together, these recurring motifs form a remarkably coherent artistic language.

Connecting the dots 

Kusama’s earliest works, made in postwar Japan, already show the obsessive repetition and close attention to pattern that would later become central to her practice. Her relationship with painting was formed by what she saw and experienced in her recurring visions. She later said that painting helped her cope with these experiences by turning them into images.

When Kusama arrived in New York in 1968, American artists were challenging the established boundaries of painting and sculpture. She soon developed a practice that moved freely between different forms and materials. In her Infinity Nets series, she covered the canvas with thousands of tiny brushstrokes, repeating the same movement again and again. The pattern spread across the entire surface, with no clear beginning or end, creating the feeling that it could continue forever. When one small mark is repeated over and over, each almost disappears into the whole. Instead of focusing on one part of the painting, the viewer sees the entire surface as one continuous pattern. This became a starting point for Kusama’s later work with repetition and the idea of infinite space.

Yayoi Kusama, 'Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart', 2025. Mirror-polished stainless steel with glass mirrors and colored acrylic, inside view. Collection of the artist

Yayoi Kusama amid her installation 'Narcissus Garden' at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966

Her paintings expanded into the surrounding space, while soft sculptures covered with phallic forms transformed everyday objects into unusual, repetitive structures. Mirrors, lights, and repeated objects altered the viewer’s sense of scale, while her performances brought the human body directly into the work. In her body-painting events, naked participants covered in painted dots became part of her exploration of sexuality and social conventions.

Kusama’s work was closely connected to the counterculture of the 1960s. She organized happenings in public spaces and staged events that addressed war and authority. In 1966, she presented Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale, placing hundreds of mirrored spheres on the lawn outside the official exhibition and offering them for sale to visitors. It was a direct challenge to the norms of the art world. 

The New York years are essential to understanding the development of Kusama’s work. Long before her later immersive installations, she was already experimenting with ways to connect painting, objects, space and the human body.  At the centre of her practice was the idea of self-obliteration—the constant multiplication of the self until it dissolves into its surroundings. A body covered with dots becomes part of a dotted environment. An object repeated hundreds of times loses its status as an individual thing. A viewer entering a mirror room sees their own body reflected again and again, no longer occupying a stable, singular position in space.

The most radical consequence of this repetition is that the artwork eventually stops being something to look at from the outside. In her Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama takes the logic of the Infinity Nets beyond the canvas and turns it into an environment. Mirrors multiply lights, colors, bodies, and objects, making the boundaries of the room seem to disappear. There is no obvious center and no stable horizon; instead, the viewer becomes part of an image that appears to extend without end. For a few moments, physical reality and the illusion of limitless space become difficult to separate. This shift—from painting to object, from object to environment, from environment to immersive space—is one of the most important aspects in Kusama's art. 

Just as repetition allowed Kusama to turn a flat surface into an endless space, it allowed her to transform familiar objects into recurring images and symbols. Another recognizable motif in her art, the pumpkin, could take the form of a sculpture, a painting, or an object in an installation. Repetition here does not mean sameness. It creates a structure within which difference can continue to appear. That may be the key to understanding Kusama's entire practice. She spent her career repeating herself without ever quite making the same work twice.

Installation view "Yayoi Kusama", 2026, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Installation view "Yayoi Kusama," 2026, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

From avant-garde outsider to global icon

In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. In 1977, she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she continued to live and work. Painting remained central to her practice. So did writing: Kusama produced poetry, fiction and autobiographical texts alongside her visual work. Her studio practice continued to generate new series of paintings and sculptures, as she revisited earlier ideas and motifs, developing them in new ways.

The later decades of her career brought international recognition on a scale that had been difficult to imagine during her New York years. Major exhibitions and museum acquisitions established her as one of the most important Japanese artists of the postwar period. She became a global cultural figure whose work attracted massive museum audiences. Her mirror rooms are among the most photographed contemporary artworks in the world. Her pumpkins and dots have entered fashion, design, and popular culture. Her name has become legendary far beyond the institutional art world.

The contrast between these two versions of Kusama—the radical avant-garde artist and the global icon—is central to her legacy. Rather than seeing them as opposing sides of her career, it is more useful to understand how one grew out of the other. Kusama's work was always capable of producing both contemplation and spectacle. A mirror room can be both an existential environment and a photograph; a dot can be both a metaphysical symbol and a popular culture image.

She wanted to dissolve boundaries between the individual and the universe. Popular culture has, in its own way, helped her images escape the boundaries of the museum. The Stedelijk's retrospective brings these different versions of Kusama back together.

Yayoi Kusama
September 11, 2026 – January 17, 2027
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam