Yayoi Kusama obituary

Artist known for her dazzling polka-dotted paintings and infinity mirror room installations The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has died aged 97, created an exhilarating oeuvre of polka-dotted paintings, stuffed cloth phalloi and provocative happenings, films and installations, as well as a curate’s egg of novels and poetry.

Kusama’s autobiography, Infinity Net (2002), relates her work directly to the obsessions and neuroses from which she suffered throughout her life: “From my very earliest memories, I have felt imprisoned by the walls of my eyes and ears and heart, upon which have been emblazoned all manner of things – nature, the universe, people and blood and flowers….

The only way for me to elude these furtive appearances is to recreate them visually with paint, pen or pencil in an attempt to decipher what they are.” When she first arrived in New York in the late 1950s, critics and fellow artists praised her originality.

Kusama’s friend Donald Judd , the minimalist artist, described her as transcending “whatever ... is oriental or American” but nonetheless emphasised her shallow pictorial space and other formal qualities associated with contemporary art in New York.

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