Yayoi Kusama made us feel infinity

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has died at 97, leaving behind one of the most recognizable and immersive bodies of work in contemporary art.

For more than seven decades, Kusama transformed repetition into entire worlds. Dots multiplied across canvases, pumpkins and bodies. Mirrors dissolved the boundaries of rooms. Lights appeared to continue forever. What began as a deeply personal visual language eventually became something millions of people around the world could physically enter.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began experiencing visions of repeating patterns and fields at a young age. Rather than trying to escape them, she eventually made repetition central to her practice. After moving to New York in 1957, she became part of the city's avant-garde, working across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and happenings while developing ideas that would remain present throughout her career.

Her Infinity Nets reduced painting to obsessive fields of repeated marks. In 1965, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field took that repetition beyond the canvas, surrounding visitors with mirrors and hundreds of repeated forms until the architecture itself seemed to disappear.

A year later came Narcissus Garden. Created around the 1966 Venice Biennale without an official invitation, the installation scattered 1,500 mirrored spheres across the grounds. Kusama attempted to sell them individually to visitors, turning the work into both an infinite field of reflections and a provocation about the commercialization of art.

But it was perhaps her Infinity Mirror Rooms that most radically changed the relationship between artwork and viewer.

Inside them, mirrors, lights, sculptures and reflections multiply beyond what the eye can locate. The viewer becomes part of the work, their own body repeated alongside everything else. Decades before the idea of an “immersive exhibition” became ubiquitous, Kusama was building environments that asked people not simply to look at art, but to enter it.

Her pumpkins became another recurring language. Covered in dots and distorted in scale, an ordinary form became unmistakably hers. Works such as The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens surrounded visitors with Kusama's yellow-and-black pattern until object, room and image began to collapse into one another.

There is an interesting contradiction at the center of Kusama's legacy. Her work is immediately recognizable, yet so much of it is concerned with making the individual disappear. She described ideas of self-obliteration throughout her career: repetition continuing until the boundaries between ourselves and everything surrounding us begin to dissolve.

By the later decades of her life, the experiences she had pioneered became global phenomena. People queued for hours to spend moments inside her mirrored rooms. Her exhibitions travelled internationally, her pumpkins became landmarks, and her visual language crossed generations far beyond the traditional art world.

But behind the spectacle was an artist who spent a lifetime returning to the same fundamental ideas: repetition, infinity, accumulation, obsession and our place within something much larger than ourselves.

Yayoi Kusama did more than create images people remember.

She created spaces people remember being inside.