Yayoi Kusama
1929 - 2026
Red River Inside my Eyelids
Ink, pastel, felt pen on paper
55 x 39.8 cm (21 ⁵/₈ x 15 ⁵/₈ inches)
Signed and date lower left, Yayoi Kusama 1975
55 x 39.8 cm (21 ⁵/₈ x 15 ⁵/₈ inches)
Signed and date lower left, Yayoi Kusama 1975
Private collection, Japan
This work is accompanied by a registration card issued by Kusama Enterprise, Tokyo.
This original artwork by Yayoi Kusama is available for sale.
This original artwork by Yayoi Kusama is available for sale.
Yayoi Kusama
biography
Japanese contemporary artist, writer and designer Yayoi Kusama graduated from the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts and relocated to New York City in 1958. Kusama consistently traded on her identity as an ‘outsider’ in many contexts – as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art ‘happenings’ and events, she returned to her country of birth in 1973 and became one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary artists.
Initially associated with Abstract Expressionism, Kusama soon became an installation artist, gaining international attention during the late 1960s for her provocative ‘happenings’, which involved painting naked bodies with so-called Body-Festival (or ‘Anatomic Explosion’ and ‘Self-Obliteration’, terms used for her concept of happenings at that time), made of brightly coloured polka dots. The pattern subsequently became her favoured motif as a ‘way to infinity’. Inspired by the hallucinations she had experienced since childhood, the intricate lattice of paint that covered her famous *Infinity Net* canvases created, in the negative spaces between the loops, a polka-dot pattern that appeared to fluctuate before the viewer. Kusama also created installations that immersed viewers in her obsessive vision of endless dots or infinitely mirrored space. Her interest remained focused on the uncanny texture and hierarchy of surfaces – canvases, mirrors, furniture, clothes, floors, walls, industrial objects and the human body – and the transgressive effect each exerted upon the spaces they inhabited and defined. The pumpkin also became another central motif in Kusama’s iconography.
Since 1977, Kusama had lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work was marked by obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. Her extensive and uniquely diverse body of work shared characteristics of Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop Art, Abstraction, Conceptual and Performance art, while continuing to defy neat categorisation.
Over the course of her career, there were major international exhibitions of Kusama’s work. In 1998, a significant retrospective of her work opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, travelling to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Kusama was selected as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She continued to work until her final days and died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026, aged 97.
Initially associated with Abstract Expressionism, Kusama soon became an installation artist, gaining international attention during the late 1960s for her provocative ‘happenings’, which involved painting naked bodies with so-called Body-Festival (or ‘Anatomic Explosion’ and ‘Self-Obliteration’, terms used for her concept of happenings at that time), made of brightly coloured polka dots. The pattern subsequently became her favoured motif as a ‘way to infinity’. Inspired by the hallucinations she had experienced since childhood, the intricate lattice of paint that covered her famous *Infinity Net* canvases created, in the negative spaces between the loops, a polka-dot pattern that appeared to fluctuate before the viewer. Kusama also created installations that immersed viewers in her obsessive vision of endless dots or infinitely mirrored space. Her interest remained focused on the uncanny texture and hierarchy of surfaces – canvases, mirrors, furniture, clothes, floors, walls, industrial objects and the human body – and the transgressive effect each exerted upon the spaces they inhabited and defined. The pumpkin also became another central motif in Kusama’s iconography.
Since 1977, Kusama had lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work was marked by obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. Her extensive and uniquely diverse body of work shared characteristics of Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop Art, Abstraction, Conceptual and Performance art, while continuing to defy neat categorisation.
Over the course of her career, there were major international exhibitions of Kusama’s work. In 1998, a significant retrospective of her work opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, travelling to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Kusama was selected as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She continued to work until her final days and died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026, aged 97.
Yayoi Kusama
biography
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