Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama died at 97 August 27, 2026

She was 97 years old and had lived and worked for half a century in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Yayoi Kusama passed away on August 14 and her death was only made public last night. An obsessive avant-garde artist, by the 1990s she had become one of the most sought-after and highly rated icons of contemporary art.

The avant-garde artist known as the “Queen of Polka Dots,” who died on August 14, transformed her hallucinations and trauma into vivid works featuring her iconic motifs of polka dots, nets and infinity. An intimate obsession born from mental fragility that has become over the decades one of the most profitable and powerful symbols of contemporary art.

Born in 1929 into a wealthy family, Yayoi Kusama was a teenager when she looked at a pattern of red flowers drawn on a tablecloth. The drawing escapes, invades the space and covers it entirely. The hallucination repeats itself, weakens his perception of reality. She could have sunk, carried away by these visions, but she turned it into a strength and an art.

Yayoi quickly drew the famous pumpkin covered in polka dots which would become her signature. For her, this decorative motif is first and foremost an intimate vision of the soul. In 1958, she moved to New York. His work, unclassifiable and avant-garde, disconcerts an America that is nevertheless open to the imagination.

Voluntary hospitalization

She returned to Tokyo in 1973 to voluntarily move into a psychiatric hospital, right next to her studio. A seclusion that becomes a way of living and working. Recognition comes even later. In 1993, at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art.

The woman with the red wig seduces with her rooms of infinite mirrors where the same obsessions are endlessly reflected. Big brands like Louis Vuitton are taking over his work. The markets, that of art and that of luxury, admire his work. She continued to paint until her last days, cloistered in her colorful universe.

With RFI