MY MAGICAL ATTIC: YAYOI KUSAMA AT FONDATION BEYELER

December 24, 2025

YAYOI KUSAMA AT FONDATION BEYELER

October 12, 2025 – January 25, 2026

YAYOI KUSAMA AT FONDATION BEYELER

October 12, 2025 – January 25, 2026

This autumn, the Fondation Beyeler is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to the work of Yayoi Kusama (*1929, lives and works in Tokyo), one of the most groundbreaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition, developed in close collaboration with the artist and her studio, brings together over 300 works from Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, France and Switzerland, underscoring the global resonance and enduring impact of Kusama’s artistic legacy.

Spanning over seven decades, the exhibition traces Kusama’s extraordinary journey from her earliest creative efforts in postwar Japan to her internationally celebrated status today. Beginning with rarely seen paintings and watercolours made in the early 1950s in her hometown of Matsumoto, the exhibition follows her bold transition to New York in the late 1950s, where she played a formative role in the avant-garde scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. Returning to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama continued to reinvent her artistic language in deeply personal and politically resonant ways. Today, she is arguably the most well known living female artist and remains a force of remarkable innovation and relevance, creating new work with undiminished intensity.

Through more than 70 years of production, Kusama has consistently defied categorization. Her practice spans a rich array of media – painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, collage, fashion, literature, and film – making her one of the most versatile and influential artists of our time. The exhibition foregrounds key periods of radical invention, offering a dynamic portrait of an artist who continues to reshape our understanding of art and experience.

Central to Kusama’s oeuvre is the concept of infinity – not merely as a formal device, but as a lived, spiritual, and psychological reality. Her hallmark motifs – polka dots, nets, mirrors, and repetitive forms – are more than aesthetic signatures; they reflect a profound meditation on the cycles of life and death, the dissolution of the self, and the desire for transcendence. From the hypnotic intricacy of her infinity net paintings to the immersive intensity of the Infinity Mirror Rooms especially produced for the exhibition, Kusama creates worlds that envelop the viewer in endless visual loops. These recursive environments disrupt the boundaries between interior and exterior, body and space, self and cosmos. Through repetition, Kusama evokes the rhythmic pulse of existence.

Her works are not simply to be observed – they are to be experienced. Her mirrored installations and expansive environments pull viewers into perceptual and emotional states of suspension and immersion. In doing so, Kusama transforms personal struggle into shared sensation. Her art becomes a space of connection, where repetition offers both confrontation and comfort, vulnerability and power. This landmark exhibition will feature a wide range of iconic pieces, including over 130 works that have never been shown in Europe, alongside new works produced specifically for this occasion. Among the highlights are her mesmerising early works, the iconic infinity nets and the accumulation sculptures, Narcissus Garden, 1966/2025, and Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart, 2025. “Yayoi Kusama” will also feature a brand-new Infinity Mirror Room and immersive environment created especially for the exhibition. Visitors will have the rare opportunity to experience the full scope of Kusama’s vision – from intimate early drawings to monumental environments – unfolding across the galleries of the Fondation Beyeler. Taking over 10 galleries and the garden, her mesmerising installations will transform not only the museum interiors and architecture but also the adjacent park. Visitors can expect an immersive experience as Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms and vibrant sculptures extend beyond traditional gallery walls, creating a seamless flow of art that engages the museum environment and surrounding landscape in a captivating dialogue of colour, light, and form.

The exhibition offers a multilayered encounter with an artist whose work continues to challenge perception, provoke thought, and awaken feeling. It is a celebration of Kusama’s boundless imagination and an invitation to reflect on the infinite within ourselves.

A richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, edited by Leontine Coelewij, Stephan Diederich, and Mouna Mekouar, and designed by Teo Schifferli, is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. Conceived not just about the artist, but with the artist and her studio, the publication features new texts from different fields such as astrophysics, biology, fashion, computer science, and sociology by Emanuele Coccia, Katie Mack, Stefano Mancuso, Ralph McCarthy, SooJin Lee, Agata Soccini, and Helen Westgeest, archival materials, and contributions from Kusama herself. Through her own words, the book will offer deeper insight into the world as Kusama sees it.

You may click below link to reach and buy Yayoi Kusama’s Fondation Beyeler exhibition catalog to read below essays:

- Footprints of the Universe. An Introduction by Leontine Coelewij, Stephan Diederich, Mouna Mekouar

- Like a Plant by Stefano Mancuso

- I Have Seen the Big Bang. It Looks Like Polka Dots. by Katie Mack

- Portraits of the Artist: Yayoi Kusama Performing for the Camera by SooJin Lee

- Yayoi Kusama, or the Metamorphosis of Fashion by Emanuele Coccia

- Accumulation, Obliteration, and Nudity Merging with Hippie Counterculture:

- Yayoi Kusama’s Sociopolitical Happenings by Helen Westgeest

- The Virtual within Reality: Immersion, Perception, Embodiment, and the Art of Yayoi Kusama by Agata Marta Soccini

- Kusama Lit: Outlasting the Devil by Ralph McCarthy

- Struggle and Wanderings of My Soul (excerpt) by Yayoi Kusama

- Poems: A Selection by Yayoi Kusama

https://shop.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/artikel/yayoi-kusama-english-37038/37038?_gl=1*tp8ptb*_gcl_au*MTc4MTAxMjM2Ny4xNzY1NzM0NTIw*_ga*MTgwMjU2NzEyMC4xNzY1NzM0NTIw*_ga_VHQJKK7N3M*czE3NjY0MTQ5NjQkbzIkZzEkdDE3NjY0MTQ5ODAkajQ0JGwwJGgw

PUMPKIN, 1981

Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas

Dimensions: 130.3 × 97 cm

The pumpkin has been a significant motif in Kusama’s work since the early 1980s. Her Pumpkin paintings were first shown as a group in 1983 in the exhibition Encounter of Souls, which took place in the Jardin de Luseine, a dwelling in a Western, Art Nouveau style located in Harajuku, Tokyo. For the occasion, the en trance hall of the house was completely filled with pumpkin sculptures and paintings.

Kusama’s fascination with pumpkins harks back to her childhood in rural Japan. In her autobiography, she describes how, while walking through a field of f lowers with her grandfather, she encountered a pumpkin the size of a human head: “It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner. It was still moist with dew, indescribably appealing, and tender to the touch.” In Japanese, the term “pump kin head” describes an unattractive, ignorant man.

‘’ It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance. ‘’ 33

Her first small pumpkin sculptures were made of papier-mâché or clay. Later versions were crafted in fiber-reinforced plastic, bronze, aluminum, and other materials. With dotted decorations and variations in scale and form—ranging from graceful and elegant to plump and comical—Kusama situates the pumpkin at the center of her biological-cosmic universe, in which she links the natural world, her psyche, and the infinite cosmos. LC

PUMPKIN, 1991

Acrylic on Canvas,

Dimensions: 91 x 116.7 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

PUMPKIN, 1991

Acrylic on Canvas,

Dimensions: 91 x 116.7 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

PUMPKIN, 2009

Fiber - Reinforced Plastic and Polyurethane Paint

Dimensions: 220 × 260 × 260 cm

INFINITY NETS (T.Z.A), 1943–89

Acrylic on Canvas, Six Parts

Dimensions: Overall: 194 × 786 cm

SPROUTING, 1992

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: Three Parts; Overall 145.5 × 336 cm

Sprouting is typical of Yayoi Kusama’s monumental canvases from 1990 to 2010. It combines the themes of her early Infinity Net paintings with her interest in natural processes. The work, over three meters in length, consists of three panels featuring a pattern of curved lines in various shades of yellow against a black background. Some lines are painted very thinly, while others are thicker, creating a rhythmic, undu lating network. The title refers to the developmental stages of plant life, such as seed germination and the growth of spores. The yellow arcs resemble new shoots forming on a plant or from seeds, while also reminis cent of a network of nerves in the human body.

Some of Kusama’s paintings reference organic pat terns and processes found in nature, while other canvases refer more to galaxies and the infinite universe. LC

YELLOW FLAME, 1995

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: Three Parts Overall: 194 × 390.9 cm

DEATH OF MY SORROWFUL YOUTH COMES

WALKING WITH RESOUNDING STEPS, 2017

From the My Eternal Soul Series, 2009–2021

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 x 194 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

ILLUSION OF LOVE, 2014

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

THE GRAVE OF RUIN, 2015

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

A POEM IN MY HEART, 2010

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

MOMENT OF DEATH, 2013

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

NIGHT OF THE FESTIVAL, 2016

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

I SAW IN THE MORNING SUN, 2017

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 194 cm

EVERYTHING ABOUT MY LOVE, 2013

From the My Eternal Soul series, 2009–2021

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 x 194 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

Kusama With Her Installation Narcissus Garden

at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966

NARCISSUS GARDEN 1966/2025

Kusama’s “art trade” performance, though it did al Kusama made her debut at the Venice Biennale in June 1966. Unlike her fellow artists, she presented her work without any official invitation, although she did receive permission from the chairman of the committee. The preparations for her contribution, Narcissus Garden, started a year earlier at the Milan studio of Lucio Fontana, who also supported the project financially. The 1,500 chrome-plated balls were transported to Venice and then installed at the intended site: a patch of grass near the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale. Finally, Kusama herself, clad in a golden kimono, entered the work. Standing among the sil very balls, she greeted the visitors walking by, thus involving members of the public in her work. The artist had effectively slipped into the role of art dealer, even selling some of the balls for two US dollars each as well as distributing flyers with a text by the art historian and writer Herbert Read. The biennale management objected to her sales and forbade low the installation to remain in place until the end of the exhibition. The title Narcissus Garden is an allusion to the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own mirror image. As a work addressing narcissism, commercialization, and self-reflection, Kusama articulates her criticism of the vanity prevalent in the international art scene. Furthermore, as the balls mirror both the people contemplating them and their surroundings, they also forge a link be tween the individual and space. Narcissus Garden has since been installed in different places world wide and remains a key example of Kusama’s engagement with the self-image and bringing her art to a broad audience. “I think that art should be within the price range for the masses rather than for a few wealthy individuals . . . People should be able to buy art as easily as food at the supermarket and socks at the haberdashers.” 24 CS

NARCISSUS GARDEN

FLOWER, 1950s \ 1962

Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 30.5 x 30.4 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

SELF-OBLITERATION #2, 1967

Gouache, Pen, Pastel, and Photo Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 40 × 50.4 cm

SELF-OBLITERATION #2, 1967 (DETAIL)

SELF-OBLITERATION #1, 1967

Gouache, Pen, Pastel, and Photo Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 40.4 × 50.4 cm

SELF-OBLITERATION #4, 1967

Pen, Pastel, and Photo Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 40 × 50.4 cm

SELF-OBLITERATION #3, 1967

Gouache, Pen, Pastel, and Photo Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 40 × 50.4 cm

SELF-OBLITERATION, 1967

Ink on Photograph by Harrie Verstappen

Dimensions: 18.2 × 24 cm

Infinite repetition is at the heart of Yayoi Kusama’s vocabulary and characterizes all her work from the Infinity Net paintings to sculptures stuffed with soft phallic forms, installations, performances, and films. Her practice, which at the time was fundamentally performative, also shows her willingness to paint over drawings, reassemble collages, and combine finished paintings and sculptures to create environments.

The boldness she demonstrates in her unusual form of invention is inextricable from the courage she shows in achieving it. The concept of “self-obliteration” stems from Kusama’s childhood hallucinations, in which her body and surroundings are enveloped in nets, Self-Obliteration, 1967, ink on photograph by Harrie Verstappen, 18.2 × 24 cm dots, and other repetitive patterns. Related to these formative experiences, self-obliteration is the pro cess by which the self is metaphorically fragmented but also melded to the environment and the cosmos. With this obsessive creativity, Kusama erases all separation and distinction between art and life. This concept finds expression in the photographs in which the artist uses polka dots or nets to cover herself and her environment. These two images can thus be seen as a metaphor for abandoning identity, abolishing uniqueness, and becoming one with the universe. “By obliterating one’s individual self,” she tells us, “one returns to the infinite universe.” 21 MM

THE FONDATION BEYELER

The Fondation Beyeler was officially inaugurated in Riehen on the outskirts of Basel on 18 October 1997, providing Hildy and Ernst Beyeler’s remarkable art collection with a publicly accessible home. The new museum was built by the Genovese architect Renzo Piano, whose work includes the Centre Pompidou in Paris, over a period of around three years. An extension to the museum was officially inaugurated in September 2000.

The building of the museum was financed by a non-profit-making foundation set up by Hildy and Ernst Beyeler in 1982, which also supports the Fondation Beyeler financially. The Riehen authorities provided the site free of charge and the Canton of Basel-Stadt annually contributes CHF 2.78 million towards the museum’s operating expenses (including a contribution from Riehen).

With his tranquil, restrained building, Renzo Piano has created a museum intended “to serve art, and not the other way round.” Clad with red porphyry, it consists of four monumental parallel walls, a glass façade at either end or a winter garden on the west side that looks out over the surrounding countryside. The glass roof suspended over the structure illuminates the whole building with the natural light so desirable for exhibiting works of art. All technical or design details that might distract visitors have been deliberately eliminated from the twenty-two exhibition rooms.

Consisting of around 250 paintings and sculptures by Modernist and contemporary masters, the Beyeler Collection was accumulated by Hildy and Ernst Beyeler during more than fifty years as successful gallery owners. The collection’s scope and reputation is constantly being enhanced by the acquisition of major works by artists such as Cézanne, van Gogh and Warhol. In some rooms, selected examples of tribal art from Africa, Alaska and Oceania are displayed side by side with European and American works, creating exciting encounters to be found in virtually no other museum in the world.

Through temporary exhibitions the Fondation Beyeler repeatedly creates links between the permanent collection and contemporary art. Three special exhibitions closely associated with the permanent collection’s contents and characters are held every year.

The following exhibitions have been held at the Fondation Beyeler since its inauguration: “Jasper Johns. Loans from the Artist”, “Renzo Piano Building Workshop”, “Colours–Sounds. Vasily Kandinsky and Arnold Schönberg”, “Roy Lichtenstein”, “The Magic of Trees” with “Wrapped Trees” by Christo & Jeanne-Claude, “Face to Face to Cyberspace”, “Cézanne and Modernism”, “Colour to Light”, “Andy Warhol. Series and singles”, “Mark Rothko”, “Ornament and Abstraction”, “Anselm Kiefer. The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973–2001”, “Claude Monet ... up to digital Impressionism“, “Ellsworth Kelly. Works 1956–2002”, “EXPRESSIVE!”, “Paul Klee. Fulfillment in the Late Work”, “Mondrian + Malevich at the Center of the Collection”, “Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art”, “Calder – Miró”,

“ArchiSculpture”, “Flower Myth. Vincent van Gogh to Jeff Koons”, “The Surrealist Picasso”, “René Magritte. The Key to Dreams”, “Contemporary Voices: FondationBeyeler hosts The UBS Art Collection”, “Wolfgang Laib. The Ephemeral is Eternal”, “Henri Matisse. Figure Color Space” and, most recently “EROS. Rodin and Picasso” and "EROS in Modern Art”, “Edvard Munch. Signs of Modern Art”, “The Other Collection. Homage to Hildy und Ernst Beyeler“, „Forests of the World. The Other Engagement”, “Action Painting”, “Fernand Léger. Paris – New York“, „Venice“, „Visual Encounters – Africa, Oceania and Modern Art“, “Giacometti”, “Jenny Holzer”, “Henri Rousseau”, “Basquiat”, “VIENNA 1900. Klimt, Schiele and their Times”, “Beatriz Milhazes”, “Segantini”, “Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra”, “Louise Bourgeois”, “Surrealism in Paris – Dalí, Magritte, Miró”, “Pierre Bonnard”, “Jeff Koons”, “Philippe Parreno”, “Edgar Degas”, “Ferdinand Hodler”, “Max Ernst”, “Maurizio Cattelan”, “Thomas Schütte”, “Odilon Redon”, “Gerhard Richter”, “Gustave Courbet” and “Peter Doig”. Forthcoming exhibitions in 2015: “Paul Gauguin”, “Marlene Dumas”, and “Kazimir Malevich”.

The Fondation Beyeler owes its unique attractiveness to its combination of a superb modern art collection and a fascinating architectural and natural setting, as well as to temporary exhibitions on the highest international level that offer visitors new insights not only into 20th-century art but also into the latest developments in contemporary art.

http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/museum/impressions

You may click below link to reach news of ‘’ Fondation Beyeler: A Passion For Art ‘’ from My Magical Attic Blog.

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-fondation-beyeler-passion-for-art.html

THE FONDATION BEYELER

THE ARCHITECTURE

The Fondation Beyeler consists of three parts: the Berower Park, acquired by the Riehen authorities in 1976, the 18th-century Berower Villa, which houses the restaurant and offices, and the museum recently built by Renzo Piano. In 1991, the Genovese architect Renzo Piano–who was awarded the renowned Pritzker Prize in 1998– was invited to develop an architectural concept for the Fondation. Piano described the assignment as follows: “A museum should attempt to interpret the quality of the collection and define its relationship with the outside world. This means taking an active, but not an aggressive role.” Two years later following a referendum held in Riehen, permission was given to build the museum. Construction work began the following year and continued until autumn 1997.

THE MUSEUM BUILDING

The elongated building covers the whole breadth of the narrow plot of ground situated between a busy main road and a protected area of farmland. It combines two contrasting motifs: long, solid walls and a light, apparently floating glass roof. All the external walls are clad with red porphyry from Argentina.

The building is supported by four 127 metre-long parallel load-bearing walls placed at intervals of about seven metres. The two end façades are made of glass and look out over the park. On the road side, the museum is completed by a windowless wall that protects the building and on the inside of which the Art Shop, cloakroom, toilets, etc. are located. Piano has described this wall as a kind of “backbone” or “formative zone” from which the architecture of the whole building develops. On the opposite wall there is a winter garden with a view of the surrounding countryside.

Located between the longitudinal walls, the exhibition rooms dedicated to the permanent collection are arranged in a well-proportioned pattern that can be altered if necessary. The rooms are not organised in any strict linear order, but visitors feel a natural inclination to move in a certain direction. Another distinctive characteristic of the Fondation Beyeler is the absolute serenity of the exhibition rooms, which is unmarred by any technical or design details and is enhanced by the sensitive interplay between the walls, the ceiling and the light-coloured French oak floor.

About one-third of the total exhibition space is reserved for temporary exhibitions that are presented directly beside the permanent collection. A staircase in the adjacent winter garden leads down to the museum’s lower level, where there is a 311 square metres multi-purpose room that can also be used for temporary exhibitions.

A large glass roof lets daylight into the whole building. Unlike conventional top lighting, this roof allows the zenithal daylight to filter into the building’s interior in its natural state instead of homogenising it and making it diffuse and milky. There are also three systems with artificial light sources that illuminate the rooms when there is insufficient light from outside. With his museum for the Fondation Beyeler, Renzo Piano has created a building of restrained elegance that serves art without being self-effacing. This characteristic is discussed in detail in the book “Renzo Piano – Fondation Beyeler. A Home for Art,” which places the building in the context of international museum architecture. Basel’s international reputation as a centre of fine architecture is considerably enhanced by the Fondation Beyeler.

THE EXTENSION

Less than two years after the Fondation Beyeler’s inauguration, the museum was extended by 12 metres (between September 1999 and May 2000). The total exhibition space was increased by 458 square metres to 3,764 square metres, offering more flexibility for the organisation of exhibitions. Additional space was created on the lower level for events, seminars, new media and offices. At the same time, the museum’s grounds were extended to the north so that the building now stands in the centre of them geographically as well as in other respects.

http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/Museum/Impressions/Architecture

FONDATION BEYELER DESIGN BY RENZO PIANO

THE FONDATION BEYELER

DIRECTOR SAM KELLER

THE FONDATION BEYELER

INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – THE HOPE OF THE POLKA DOTS BURIED IN INFINITY WILL

ETERNALLY COVER THE UNIVERSE 2025

Created especially for the current exhibition, this monumental installation combines two concepts of spatial experience. On the one hand, we encounter Yayoi Kusama’s balloon installations here, whose effect first and foremost results from the physical movement of the visitors in the space. The space it self is dominated by inflatable biomorphic objects featuring a recurring pattern that is repeated on the walls, floor, and ceiling. On the other hand, the work also evinces the spatial experience found in the art ist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, chiefly determined by the optical effect of the mirrors, where everything seems to multiply infinitely. Now, Kusama has interwoven these two kinds of spatial perception, following the principle of the nesting doll. Visitors move through a jungle-like space with gigantic shapes reminiscent of tentacles or tendrils; these in turn call to mind arteries in which streams of dots seem to pulsate. In the center of this seemingly fantastical place, visitors come across a walk-in mirror room whose inte rior displays the same patterns. The closed nature of the cube condenses the spatial experience as if in a core; at the same time, it expands into infinite space in the reflections—an apparent paradox, Buried in infinity. SD

INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – THE HOPE OF THE POLKA DOTS

BURIED IN INFINITY WILL ETERNALLY COVER THE UNIVERSE 2025

UNTITLED (CHAIR ), 1963

Sewn Stuffed Fabric, and Paint

Dimensions: 81 x 93 x 92 cm

Collection of the Artist © Yayoi Kusama

After her Infinity Net paintings, Yayoi Kusama developed her Accumulations with collages of repurposed paper and soft sculptures characterized by repetitive forms. In 1962, she began creating a body of sculptural works in which she altered pieces of furniture by covering them with sewn, stuffed fabric protrusions of varying lengths and then unifying the compositions via a layer of monochrome paint. In keeping with the repetition at the heart of her process, she fashioned each of these fabric pieces, trans- forming ordinary domestic objects into powerful, symbolic sculptures. Donald Judd, who happened to be Kusama’s neighbor and, as she writes in her auto- biography, her first close friend in the city, helped her sew multiple stuffed phallic forms affixed to her first chair titled Accumulation No. 1.17

The present sculpture is part of a group that she would continue to develop over several decades. Over the entire surface of the chair—on the seat, sides, and back—she affixed a series of small to medium-sized protuberances underneath the accumulated soft pro trusions. She has referred to these puffy projections as phalluses, once remarking: “My sofas, couches, dresses and rowboats bristle with phalluses.” 18 The repetitive patterns of the soft sculptures, like the dots of her Infinity Net paintings, contribute to the creation of invasive environments in which no focal point or benchmark can guide the eye. Moreover, the idea of accumulation in Kusama’s art is not only an obsessive and compulsive tendency or an innate desire for repetition; it makes the object itself dis appear along with its function. Beyond the objects’ undeniable cathartic power, they are also an expression of the artist’s organic vision of the world as an indivisible whole, in which objects and all living beings are constantly transforming and intermingling. As she has put it: “I make them and make them and keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration.’” 19 MM

PHALLIC GIRL, 1967

Mannequin, Mixed Media

Dimensions: 189.2 × 106.7 × 58.4 cm

UNTITLED ACCUMULATION, 1962 – 1963

Ten Pairs of High-Heeled Shoes, Sewn Stuffed Fabric, and Paint

Overall Dimensions Variable

Yayoi Kusama created her Shoes in the 1960s, at a time when she was engaged in a radical exploration of obsession, sexuality, and the concept of repetition. The works belong to her Accumulations, in which she covered everyday objects such as pieces of furniture and clothing—and in one instance a rowboat—with stuffed fabric phalluses.

In Untitled Accumulation Kusama overlaid several ladies’ shoes with a multitude of fabric phalluses, transforming them into surreal, exuberant-looking sculptures. This extreme take-over, indeed, colonization of an ordinary object—feminine footwear—turns work touches on Kusama’s own personal struggle with anxiety and desire, while at the same time reflecting on both gender-based power relations and the pressure of social norms.

Like so many of the artist’s Accumulation works, her Shoes can also be understood as a manifestation of Kusama’s artistic strategy of repetition and serial reproduction. The artist herself has used the term “self-obliteration” in this context, which for her signifies the liberating process of obsessive repetition and total immersion in her art. CS

UNTITLED (VANITY CASE), ca. 1968,

Vanity Case, Sewn Stuffed Fabric, and Silver Paint

Dimensions: 20.5 × 30 × 20.5 cm

Developed from 1961 on, when the artist was living in New York City, her soft sculptures have been an important aspect of her long practice. With her humorous, anthropomorphic, and sexualized transformations of domestic objects, starting with furniture but also extending to clothes, shoes, accessories, and even kitchenware, Yayoi Kusama’s Accumulations have become one of her “signature” groups of works. “I glued male sexual patterns on women’s clothes and sprayed them completely with silver paint,” she ex plains. “Initially, I used white paint, but began to use silver and gold sprays around 1963 as I found them to be more durable.” 20

By transforming domestic objects into sexualized artworks, she diverts their functional and cultural significance as representations of “home.” In Untitled (Vanity Case), for example, the object becomes an Kusama was photographed with this ready-made van ity case, wearing one of her iconic dresses covered with organic sculptures and surrounded on the floor by other Accumulations made of everyday objects (fig. p. 170). The photo is part of her artistic statement. While she frees these everyday objects from their social and moral attributes, she simultaneously emancipates herself from her own social, gender, and national markers as a Japanese woman artist.

Overall, her soft sculptures resemble a luxuriant flora that, like a new sprout, spontaneously proliferates through continuous mutations and vibrations. They belong to a whimsical, interconnected world where objects and living beings merge and surge with a refreshingly powerful liberty. MM

INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM – ILLUSION

INSIDE THE HEART 2025

For nearly seventy years, Yayoi Kusama has focused on themes of eternity, the sublime, and the cosmos, using accumulation, repetition, and immersive experience. Her paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations are characterized by an obsessive application of patterns—particularly polka dots—inspired by her childhood hallucinations. It was in the early 1960s that Kusama began creating her renowned Infinity Mirror Rooms. These immersive environments use mirrors to create the effect of a never- ending space. In the words of the artist, they become a “subtle planetarium,” a space in which the public can experience the mysteries of the physical and metaphysical universe.

Using natural light along with colored windows and mirrored surfaces made of stainless steel, the outdoor installation Infinity Mirrored Room— Illusion Inside the Heart reflects Kusama’s enduring connection with nature. The structure’s stainless- steel exterior is punctuated with multiple openings, Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart, 2025, inside view allowing sunlight to filter into the darkened interior. This interplay of light and dark creates an illusion of infinite space, as luminous colored dots shimmer and endlessly reflect across mirrored surfaces. The resulting visual field evokes both the infinite expanse of the cosmos and Kusama’s iconic motif: the endless repetition of dots. Through this immersive environment, the artist offers visitors a contemplative experience of boundlessness and transcendence.

To enter Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart, visitors must bow their heads, be modest, and humble themselves in preparation to immerse themselves in the experience of an ever- changing constellation. Depending on the climate, natural light, and time of day, this Infinity Mirrored Room offers each viewer a different and constantly new experience. At once immeasurable and intimate, the work underlines Kusama’s fusional engagement with nature, developing a kind of universal language that speaks to each one of us. MM

THE VIRTUAL WITHIN REALITY: IMMERSION, PERCEPTION, EMBODIMENT, AND THE ART OF YAYOI KUSAMA BY AGATA MARTA SOCCINI

1. REALITY NOT ENOUGH

Among current technologies, one stands out as deeply experiential, human-centered, and rooted in sensory perception, yet its very name is an oxymoron. Virtual reality carries a sense of magic, transporting us beyond our physical surroundings into another space and time. Through a funny pair of bulky goggles (a head-mounted display), interactive audiovisual rooms, or all kinds of wearable devices, we enter synthetic worlds in which the magic takes place. Our senses are cheated and over written, making us believe we are driving a rover on Mars and exploring outer space, or strolling through futuristic or past versions of Earth, familiar places, and the cities we live in. Besides space and time travels, virtual reality gives us the opportunity to create impossible or imaginary worlds, where we can meet digital twins of ourselves or nonexistent creatures, even abstract shapes and colors. We have just described a cutting-edge technology as the perfectly appealing new clay for artists to experiment with. The environments are created and controlled by designers and developers, and the self of the embodied participant, our self, is transfigured into an avatar that can range from a realistic representation of us to a completely nonanthropomorphic being, capable of movements and actions beyond what is possible in the physical world. It seems unbelievable until experienced firsthand, yet we live in an era in which technology can make such an illusion a reality.

Back in 2015, while visiting the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, I realized that the artistic exploration of space extends the transformative power of materials, and shapes human perception, in ways that are very close to what happens in virtual reality. Installations, rooms, and lights open gateways to unexplored aesthetics and unknown worlds that artists create and invite us to enter, and the underlying concepts contribute to the evolving philosophy of generating virtual worlds. That is how I came to realize that several contemporary artists deserve credit for helping to define computer graphics and virtual reality paradigms. I suddenly felt the need to survey my colleagues worldwide on the subject, particularly curators and professionals at contemporary art museums and those organizing independent exhibitions, as well as technologists, scientists, and dig ital artists. Their response was supportive and enthusiastic, leading to interesting discussions on the topic. From there to the name of Yayoi Kusama was a short journey.

2. VIRTUAL REALITY IN ART HISTORY

To understand the nature of virtual reality, we must embrace a wide conceptual perspective, recognizing it not only as a medium of simulation but also as an artistic language that dissolves the traditional barriers between the beholder and the work of art. Unlike several conventional art forms that rely on externalized representations, virtual reality places the viewer inside the artwork, making them an active participant rather than a passive spectator. This shift challenges the historical paradigm of art consumption and places virtual reality in a direct dialogue with art movements that have sought to expand human perception, from Futurism and Surrealism to immersive installation art. Beyond addressing the definition of virtual reality, however, we must also acknowledge the visionary artists who have anticipated and embraced the philosophy of it, even before the technology itself existed in its current form. Kusama’s environments, which immerse the viewer in a boundless infinity, suggest that the conceptual foundations of virtual reality were already taking shape in twentieth-century avant-garde practices. By situating virtual reality within art history, we recognize it as a distinct movement that expands the boundaries of perception, space, and human experience, challenging and questioning the controversial dualism between the physical and the virtual, the self and the environment. Virtual reality redefines both the nature of art and how we engage with it, marking a significant shift in artistic expression.

3. VIRTUAL NOMADS

Kusama’s life and oeuvre have been characterized by a constant and prolific production over the years. Her early approach to art was through painting; in particular, she was trained in Nihonga, a traditional Japanese technique whose practice reflects the culture of precision, meticulousness, and mannerism. But Kusama is a rebel, and she needed to create worlds. Taking an exploratory approach is now a common trait among contemporary artists, largely influenced by internet-based technologies in several ways. First, the expanded access to information, global communities, travel, and diverse cultures since the late-twentieth century has fostered greater exchange and dialogue among artists and others. Second, the constant exposure to innovation and disruption via technology has played a significant role not only in shaping people’s daily life but also in the way artists create, experiment, and engage with their work. Kusama embraced this attitude before it became widespread, presenting a futuristic and revolutionary approach to art and life, anticipating the intrinsic spirit of today’s digital nomads. When she moved to New York in 1958, the wave of freedom in the air led her to become deeply involved in the avant-garde and Conceptual Art movements. While she continued to paint, she also explored other forms of expression, becoming a pioneer of art in the shape of experiences, thus laying the foundation for works that principally define her as a precursor to virtual reality.

4. KUSAMA ’S VIRTUAL REALITY

Kusama’s art sparks the broad human curiosity about immersive sensorial experiences. Like virtual environments, her environments catapult users into an altered state of perception, taking them beyond the physical world. Her installations make use of spatial and temporal manipulation, such that the visitor becomes the active center of the artwork. It is on both a perceptual and an emotional level that the real and the virtual merge, along the timelines of our lives. Time plays a fundamental role in the works, ultimately aggregating and processing the stimuli we collect while continuously jumping in and out of both the physical and the virtual spaces. Kusama herself has frequently spoken about the importance of space, both real and imagined, in her art. Her paintings, installations, and environments are not just static objects, but living, breathing spaces. She doesn’t just depict infinity: she creates, manifests, and invites us to step inside her environments and experience infinity firsthand.

The language used to describe virtual reality has evolved over time. Today, “immersive experience” is the most commonly adopted term to define the engagement with this technology, which, unsurprisingly, is the same expression we use to describe Kusama’s work. Her art continues to inspire new generations of artists working in installations, digital media, and experiential design, showing that her vision of infinite expansion remains as relevant as ever. Indeed, as I write these lines, Cyndi Lauper is performing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with Peaches, live in Berlin, both wearing a polka-dot coat, while behind them a giant video screen displays a portrait of the artist in her iconic red wig.

5. THE AESTHETICS OF OBSESSION

Dots Obsession is a series of immersive installations in which Kusama reaffirms the core elements of her artistic language: polka dots, mirrors, and, in this case, large amorphous inflatable objects (fig. 2). As a visual artist, and long before that, Kusama, as a visual person, created her own iconic aesthetics. The materials and lights she uses in Dots Obsession are far from those of a real-world landscape and much more typical of a digital movie set. The aesthetics especially recall early com puter-generated images, such as the first 3-D animation movies of the mid-1990s. A photograph of the works in this series would likely be perceived, by an unfamiliar eye, as an artificial construct, as if generated through computer graphics. Paradoxically, achieving these aesthetics in real-life physical installations is complex, but they would be relatively easy to reproduce on a digital canvas, such as a video screen. It is no coincidence that the first entirely computer-generated feature film, Toy Story, from 1995, realized by Pixar Animation Studios, was based on plastic characters mainly due to rendering constraints, since achieving more natural appearances was unfeasible at the time.

The vinyl material Kusama uses in many of her Dots Obsession works reflects light in a way that is reminiscent of simple computational lighting models, the mathematical shading techniques that computers use to simulate how light interacts with surfaces. Other classic elements of computer-graphics aesthetics likewise appear, such as her massive use of spotlights, or the emissive material assigned to the obliterated bal loons. The process of computer rendering uses lighting models to pro duce a visual approximation of the mathematical world in a way that is conceptually similar to the abstraction of reality that Kusama implements while building her obliterated rooms. Our eyes perceive these computer-generated images as pleasant and believable but certainly not as realistic, which is likely the feeling that the artist elicits from us in the physical world when capturing us in her installation works. While computer graphics and digital cinema strive toward ever greater photo- realism, the artist has been moving in the opposite direction, crafting tangible forms that evoke computer-generated imagery, even before the world had learned to recognize them as such. Kusama introduced the aesthetics of computer graphics without the use of pixels.

The Dots Obsession series anticipated virtual reality, not only through its aesthetics of computer-generated images but also by creating a sense of presence in the experiences. While technology achieves immersion using code and algorithms, Kusama’s installations exist in the physical world, creating a virtual experience through the artist’s imaginative design of a physical space. In these non-digital immersive environments, the viewer is not merely looking at art but actively inhabiting it. The series also embraces the theme of infinity, which is both a recur ring element in Kusama’s work, developed further in her Infinity Mirror Rooms from 1965 on, and an intrinsically distinctive trait of the representation of space in virtual reality (fig. p. 95; cat. pp. 282–85). The installations don’t just represent infinity; they make the viewer feel as though they are experiencing it firsthand, collapsing the barriers between reality and illusion, self and space, existence and void, just like when experiencing virtual reality.

6. THE ILLUSION OF SPACE AND TIME

The Infinity Mirror Rooms are the perfect example of how Kusama creates an environment where boundaries dissolve into an illusionary infinite space within a physically confined area (fig. 1). The artwork could be located in any city on Earth or in the middle of a forest, but once in the virtual world, there is no trace of what we left behind there. In the same way, when we enter virtual reality, the pixels on the screen of the head-mounted displays overwrite our sight, and what we look at is up to us. In contrast to gazing at a painting or a sculpture while standing in front of it, in virtual reality we find ourselves in potentially huge spaces, even though we might be in a constricted attic or sitting on a tiny chair. This discrepancy between real and virtual space takes place because the virtual-reality setup annihilates all kinds of gaps that prevent users from feeling transported to a different world. Kusama, on the other hand, is taking us into non-digital, virtual environments that she has engineered, designed, coded, and that she controls. Just as developers have the power to define the rules of the graphic and physical engines in an application, the same occurs in Kusama-coded worlds. This points to the concept of narration in the artwork, which is not lin ear in time and never the same.

We are unlikely to move our gaze in the exact same direction, second by second, when we enter the same experience several times. Our movements and the path we choose to follow will engender dynamic narratives and affect our adventure, our thoughts, and the emotional baggage we take with us once we exit virtual reality and are back in the physical world. The concept of time itself is virtualized: everything occurs and takes place, regardless of when.

The Infinity Mirror Rooms are immersive, three-dimensional environments that demand active participation. According to Kusama, they are worlds that can be lived in. Though each room consists of a mirrored chamber filled with multicolored LED lights, their true nature is only revealed when the viewer steps inside. The lights flicker and shift, and their reflections endlessly multiply in space and in time. These rooms, despite often being very small, paradoxically encompass entire time less cosmoses within their walls. The peaceful and intimate “wow effect” of disappearing into a black hole nonetheless full of colors can be related to the surprise users report when they wear a head-mounted display for the first time and realize there are infinite spaces and feelings in a wearable technological device. While the Infinity Mirror Rooms may recall a starry sky in a desert in California or a dance of fireflies, in- deed, in the gardens of Italian villas on a summer night, the emotional cosmos they evoked for me was a scientific visualization of a map of the known stars from the European Space Agency. I had the honor of working on that when I took my first steps in virtual reality for space exploration. By merging art, technology, and the psychology of perception, Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms become a portal to the impossible, an artificial yet emotionally profound space where the self becomes infinity, the finite meets the infinite, and reality is reshaped by illusion.

7. EMBODYING INFINITY / TO INFINITY

The series discussed are not the only examples of how Kusama can be seen as a precursor to virtual reality, as several similar concepts appear in other works by the artist. I’m Here, but Nothing (cat. pp. 244–45) shows how an installation’s visual appearance can resemble computer graphics.

The drawings and paintings typified by her Infinity Nets express Kusama’s will to depict infinity on paper, even before she turned attention to her immersive mirror rooms. The concept of self-obliteration emphasized in these series conveys a sense of disappearance and becoming one with the environment.

A defining aspect of virtual reality is virtual embodiment, a state in which the user is drawn into a work of art not only through their imagination but also through their physical body and its representation as an avatar. As humans, we take having a body that is our own and that as such responds to our will for granted. This assumption does not hold in virtual reality or in Kusama’s installations, where the boundaries of the self become fluid and our bodies do not necessarily respond to the laws of physics as we are used to. In recent years, Kusama has embodied an avatar of herself in the physical world, rejecting conventional notions of genders, shapes, natural colors, and even human resemblances. She keeps on working hard to virtually immerse herself into her art.

Agata Marta Soccini, a computer scientist specializing in virtual reality, is a researcher and head of the Virtual Reality Lab at the University of Torino.

You may click below link to reach and buy Yayoi Kusama’s Fondation Beyeler exhibition catalog to read below essays:

Footprints of the Universe. An Introduction by Leontine Coelewij, Stephan Diederich, Mouna Mekouar

Like a Plant by Stefano Mancuso

I Have Seen the Big Bang. It Looks Like Polka Dots. by Katie Mack

Portraits of the Artist: Yayoi Kusama Performing for the Camera by SooJin Lee

Yayoi Kusama, or the Metamorphosis of Fashion by Emanuele Coccia

Accumulation, Obliteration, and Nudity Merging with Hippie Counterculture:

Yayoi Kusama’s Sociopolitical Happenings by Helen Westgeest

Kusama Lit: Outlasting the Devil by Ralph McCarthy

Struggle and Wanderings of My Soul (excerpt) by Yayoi Kusama

Poems: A Selection by Yayoi Kusama

FESTIVAL (GIRDEN), 1952

Gouache, Ink, and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 35 × 24.5 cm

AN ANIMAL, 1952

Gouache, Ink, and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 27 × 18.7 cm

THE GERM, 1952

Ink and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 24.7 × 18 cm

TREE, 1952

Gouache, Ink, and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 25.5 × 18 cm

FLOWER, 1952

Ink and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 26.4 × 18.7 cm

ISLAND (NO. 5), 1953,

Pastel, Gouache, and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 24.1 × 33 cm

ISLAND (No. 41), 1953,

Gouache and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 23.5 × 31 cm

ISLAND IN NIGHT (No. 2), 1953,

Gouache, Ink, and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 25 × 34.3 cm

ACCUMULATION OF LETTERS, 1961

Printed Paper Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 62.5 × 74.3 cm

Accumulation of Letters is one of Yayoi Kusama’s first collages of the early 1960s. She created these by gluing together a repetitive arrangement of such everyday materials as stickers, including air mail stickers, as well as play dollar bills and cutouts from Infinity Net images. For this work, she used excerpts of her own name from printed invitations to her 1961 exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Watercolors at the Gres Gallery in Washington, DC. Two different versions of the lettering “YAYOI KUSAMA” are lined up above and beside each other hundreds of times over.

The design principle of repeating a single basic element in rows or columns or in all directions at once had been present as a two-dimensional scheme in the Infinity Net paintings Kusama produced prior to this work. There, the artist covered what were sometimes monumental canvases with fine nets of tiny, stitch-like brushstrokes. Starting in 1962, she covered whole pieces of furniture and other objects with sewn fabric phalluses and, later on, dried macaroni. At first glance, a comparison of the collages with the screen prints of series of soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles Andy Warhol created from 1962 on easily comes to mind, works that address commodity fetishism, consumerism, and standardized mass production. Kusama’s use of original set pieces, however, is much closer to the classical collage principle. Furthermore, the painstaking process of pasting countless identical parts alongside one another is directly comparable to the contemplative, but also frenzied, process of applying identical brushstrokes to the Infinity Net paintings.

Likewise evident in these collages are Kusama’s hallucinations of an identical pattern extending across surfaces and objects, her own body, and even the whole universe, something she has experienced since childhood. Some of the works from 1962 plastered with hundreds of airmail stickers manifest an autobiographical aspect that alludes to her situation as a Japanese migrant in the United States. With its repetition of the artist’s own name, Accumulation of Letters is even more self-referential and can be read as a kind of self-portrait. The interplay between personalization by using her own name and depersonalization by repeating it ad infinitum, almost to the point of self-obliteration, makes for a complex play of tensions. That “YAYOI KUSAMA,” as the work’s sole motif, also functions as a label attests to another conceptual facet of her art: her conscious self-promotion and marketing of her own person as a brand. SD

NO. PZ, 1960

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 269.2 × 177.8 cm

NO. N2, 1961

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 125 x 178 cm

In less than eighteen months after setting up her studio in New York in 1958, Yayoi Kusama radically transformed her art. She began creating her Infinity Net paintings, limiting her means to a single motif— an intricate, net-like pattern covering her canvases from edge to edge. Employing the minimal, repeated gesture of a single brushstroke, Kusama’s meticulous and labor-intensive methods literally pushed paint ing to its limits. Although this repetitive process makes them appear purely abstract, these paintings are deeply personal, connecting memories from Kusama’s isolated childhood in Japan to her new life in New York and drawing inspiration from the natural world. No. N2 was executed in 1961, Kusama’s third year in New York City. Characterized by a rippling arrangement of arcs, unlike other abstract works among her Infinity Net paintings, this work is unique in its sub tle sense of movement in the net—a highly personalized expression of Kusama’s desire to “lend specificity to the infinity of space.” 14

No. N2 is also among the artist’s first red works, departing from her initially white ones in this group. It displays an energy and sense of motion that was harder to capture in the subtle layers of her large white canvases. The red arcs and black dots merge and meld, suggesting a pulsating, powerful energy that evokes the vivid inner turbulence of Kusama’s visions. Each tiny net is hypnotic and mesmerizing, demonstrating the sheer power of her work. The nets expand and contract, swirling and falling in waves across the canvas. No. N2 is thus a striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s work for decades. MM

REPETITIVE VISION OF FLORAL PISTIL, 1989

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 194 × 130.3 cm

RAIN OF CITY, 1987

Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 45.5 x 38 cm

INFINITY NET C, 1965

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 131 × 127 cm

INFINITY NET B, 1965

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 132 × 126 cm

EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2023

Acrylic and Marker Pen on Canvas

Dimensions: 60.6 × 50 cm

EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, 2022

Acrylic and Marker Pen on Canvas

Dimensions: 100 × 100 cm

FOOTPRINTS THE UNIVERSE . AN INTRODUCTION BY LEONTINE COELEWIJ, STEPHAN DIEDERICH, AND MOUNA MEKOUAR

Footprints of the Universe is the name Yayoi Kusama gave a 2016 painting from her largest group of works to date, My Eternal Soul. The two titles hint at the element of timelessness and universality inherent in many of her works, with the series title also referring to the location of the artist’s own self within the bigger picture. They encapsulate the essential message at the heart of Kusama’s practice: a vision that transcends boundaries and dissolves definitions, revealing a profound interconnectedness between the self and the cosmos, the microcosm and the macrocosm. Over the course of her remarkable career, she has rendered the invisible rhythms of nature and the universe visible using a language that is deeply personal, poetic, and profoundly human.

Kusama has been able to make her unique vision of the world and the universe perceptible, translating it into colors, shapes, and words that resonate across space and time. The current exhibition—and the publication accompanying it—have therefore been created with Kusama, not merely about her. In close collaboration with the artist and her studio, this project seeks to illuminate the depth, multidisciplinarity, diversity, and transformative energy of her oeuvre. It traces the evolution of her artistic vocabulary and brings into focus the key moments of radical innovation that have defined her extraordinary path.

Our introduction aims at echoing the spirit of her journey—one that traverses disciplines and dimensions. Kusama’s dialogue with art, with nature, and with the infinite remains one of the most compelling in con temporary culture. As a poet and novelist, a painter and sculptor, an activist and fashion designer, she has built a singular and visionary world. Her vocabulary of forms and symbols has opened new interpretive horizons—extending from nature to politics, from the stars to the psyche. It is thus fitting that this catalogue explores such themes as infinity, accumulation, obliteration, death, and the force of life—and does so by examining the artist’s work against the backdrop of other disciplines such as astrophysics, botany, fashion, literature, and sociology.

Kusama doesn’t shy away from addressing the truly big themes in her art. She does so with the same dedication that she did in her youth, when she immersed herself in the sight of a pumpkin for days to capture its essence on paper.

To the extent that Kusama herself is at the center of her art, which is largely fed by biographical and observational data, by the processing of her own experiences and feelings, she allows her works to become mirrors of her being as well as messages to the outside world. For her, participation in being in the world inevitably involves the dissolution of her own self in the universal, something that might strike us as both fundamental and incomprehensible, disturbing and comforting.

Themes of death and renewal echo throughout the catalogue as well as the exhibition. Kusama’s formative years—shaped by the trauma of World War II and, even then, by a struggle that would accompany her throughout her life—have profoundly influenced her worldview. The sculptural work A Gateway to Hell (1974; cat. p. 200) speaks to the intense burnout that followed years of prolific production. Nearby, Atomic Bomb (1954; cat. pp. 78–79), a haunting piece in gouache, ink, and pastel, offers an abstract yet powerful response to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—an event she experienced during her lifetime. For Kusama, art has always been both expression and refuge: “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. Painting helps me to keep away thoughts of death for myself. That is the power of art.” 1

And yet, with Kusama, nothing is ever final. Death gives way to regeneration. Out of despair emerges her life force. Nowhere is this more evident than in My Eternal Soul (2009–21; cat. pp. 274–77), a monumental series of nearly nine hundred paintings begun when the artist was eighty years old. This vast body of work affirms her relentless drive to create, her enduring will to live through art, and her belief in the transformative power of the imagination. This group of paintings culminates in her ongoing series Every Day I Pray for Love, which she began in 2021 (cat. pp. 286–91). This work is “a testament to the enormous drive for life” Kusama finds in painting daily.2 She embodies an indefatigable spirit and holds a profound belief in art’s ability to heal. “In recent years the world has become unpeaceful and full of turmoil,” she has said.3 “As an artist, I think it is important to share the love and peace and hope to deliver that to people who are suffering . . . [and] to leave the message of ‘love forever’ to the younger generations.” 4

This catalogue and moreover the exhibition tell the story of an artist who, with boundless vision and unyielding spirit, has transcended personal, social, and cultural limitations to create a groundbreaking body of work. The presentation of her work is an invitation to journey with her—through infinity, through love, through life.

Born in 1929 to an established and affluent family who owned and managed a plant nursery in Matsumoto (figs. 1–3), young Yayoi spent her childhood in an environment that was primarily determined by two external factors. On the one hand, there was the constant and intensive experience of nature in all stages of growth, from blossoming to fading, which she repeatedly captured in drawings from an early age on. On the other hand, her parents had an unhappy marriage, characterized by the pleasure-seeking and infidelities of her father, who had married into the family, and the frustration and simultaneous dominance of her mother, which manifested itself in excessive severity toward her sensitive daughter. The consequences of this discordant familial relationship, reflective of a larger societal double standard regarding men’s and women’s social roles and sexual behaviors, would come to exert a significant influence on Kusama’s thinking. Perhaps triggered or at least exacerbated by these family tensions, Yayoi, then not yet ten years old, began to suffer from perceptual changes that manifested themselves in auditory and visual hallucinations, which would later be diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. At times she heard animals and plants speaking to her, at other times she saw auras around things or experienced how repetitive patterns of flowers or dots spread across furniture, her own body, the entire room, and beyond. By indefatigably capturing the images of her altered perception in drawings, perhaps to reassure herself of their reality, Kusama, according to her own assessment, laid the foundation for her very own artistic language.

The fact that she grew up during wartime for most of her childhood and youth also had a lasting influence on the young Kusama. This spanned the Second Sino-Japanese War, in 1937−45, in which numerous soldiers from Matsumoto lost their lives, and the Pacific War, in 1941−45, in the course of World War II, culminating in the traumatic detonation of the 21 atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In addition to the frighteningly real omnipresence of death, there was the increasing curtailment of the individual in the course of war propaganda and growing nationalism. It is not least against the backdrop of these years that Kusama’s desire for peace and the need to develop free thought, themes present throughout her entire life and work, should be seen.

At the age of nineteen, Kusama went to study art—an advancement for women that the Japanese government had then recently approved—for a year at the Kyoto City Senior High School of Art, though only after her mother’s initial resistance had been assuaged. Her parents granted permission on the condition that their daughter learn etiquette. She also was to study Nihonga, an art movement based on traditional Japanese techniques and strict formal criteria. Although repelled by the encrusted hierarchical structures and national orientation of the teaching establishment, immersing herself in Nihonga helped her to focus on her inner self as the source of her artistic expression. Back in Matsumoto, Kusama worked day and night in her room on oil paint ings, drawings, and watercolors, experimenting with different materials to express the constant flow of her impressions and emotions. While her familial circumstances remained difficult and her mental state at times precarious, her art was increasingly successful. In 1952 she had her first solo exhibition, with over two hundred works, at the First Community Centre in Matsumoto, followed by an even larger show the same year (figs. 4–6). Further exhibitions followed in Tokyo, and Kusama increasingly enjoyed nationwide recognition. Her psychiatrist, Shihō Nishimaru, who had been treating her illness and also presented 20 a scientific paper on her titled “Genius Woman Artist with Schizophrenic Tendency,” finally encouraged her to become independent from her mother and live abroad. Kusama later wrote in her autobiography:

‘’ I knew that no matter where I went in Japan, my mother would track me down, and I did not want to end up in some sort of school for the mentally ill. But most importantly, I felt that my art stood in opposition to the conservatism and insularity of Japan. I had to get out. ‘’ 5

This plan was prompted by an exchange of letters with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose art Kusama admired and whose address she had finally obtained via the US Embassy. All of this is an example of her determination and perseverance when it comes to her art, which was to be followed by many further examples in subsequent years, despite often adverse circumstances.

Kusama’s first sojourn in the United States in particular turned out to be extremely rocky in this respect. After her initial months in Seattle, where she had organized an exhibition at the Zoë Dusanne Gallery, Kusama moved to New York in June 1958, the real destination of her yearnings. Life there proved to be precarious, with studio rent, work materials, and living expenses barely affordable; her grueling work phases were often followed by hallucinations and panic attacks. She nevertheless threw herself feverishly into her work, obsessively creating almost monochrome canvases, some monumental in size, filled with thousands of tiny arcs. As Kusama herself described them, they “ignored composition and had no centres. The monotony produced by their repetitive patterns bewildered the viewer, while their hypnotic serenity drew the spirit into a vertigo of nothingness.” 6 The Infinity Net paintings were born (figs. 9–15). When five of these works were shown at a solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in 1959, their relevance was instantly recognized by the New York art world. Respected art critics wrote enthusiastic reviews, including the later Minimal Art pioneer Donald Judd, who was to become a close friend of Kusama’s for many years. The German curator and museum director Udo Kultermann, who also attended the Brata show, selected a large white Infinity Net painting for his legend ary exhibition Monochrome Malerei (Monochrome Painting) at the Städtisches Museum, Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen the following year, introducing her to the European art scene. This was followed by her participation in other important exhibitions, such as Nul (Zero) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1962, curated by Henk Peeters.

That same year, Kusama took another important step by covering pieces of furniture with hundreds of sewn, stuffed, and white-painted fabric phallus-shaped forms, thus creating her first soft sculptures and Accumulations (fig. 16). For her, this artistic invention also signified an effort to confront her phallic anxieties and her aversion to sex in a typically excessive manner.

‘’ The reason my first soft sculptures were shaped like penises is that I had a fear of sex as something dirty. People often assume that I must be mad about sex, because I make so many such objects, but that’s a complete misunderstanding. It’s quite the opposite—I make the objects because they horrify me. ‘’ 7

She herself identified the origins for this phobia in the family experiences of her youth and rigid, male-oriented Japanese society. Another aversion of hers concerned food, and macaroni, with which she covered entire objects, became the medium she chose to give concrete expression to this fixation of hers. In December 1963, Kusama’s ground breaking installation Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show was presented at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York, featuring as the single, central object a rowboat with her typical soft sculpture protrusions, while the walls of the room were covered with 999 black-and white reproductions of the boat sculpture (cat. pp. 130–31).

In addition to Kusama’s many other important projects and exhibitions of those years, at least one installation with a performative character should be mentioned here—her unofficial participation in the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. Narcissus Garden (cat. p. 156; figs. 17–18) was an arrangement of 1,500 chrome-plated balls on a lawn, creating a field that reflected images of the biennale visitors, architecture, and gardens; its title refers to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. Kusama herself distributed flyers and carried out a performance lying down on the grass among the spheres. She offered the balls for sale like a street vendor selling ice cream, proclaiming: “Your narcissism for sale: one piece 2 dollars” (cat. p. 157). Kusama’s participatory endeavor to involve viewers in the artwork runs throughout her entire subsequent oeuvre.

Around 1967, Kusama became ever more involved in New York’s vibrant underground art scene and hippie counterculture. While she had previously often staged herself in photographs with a specific message or intended effect, she now went a step further with her performances and Happenings, appearing in public with media impact on the one hand and dissolving the boundaries between art, society, and the environment on the other.

While Kusama herself was still the sole protagonist in her performances such as Walking Piece (ca. 1966; cat. pp. 158–59), in which her presence in a pink kimono and flower-adorned parasol posed a disturbing contrast to the urban streetscape of New York, the body painting events she initiated shortly thereafter became collective group Happenings (figs. 19–24). By painting dots on naked people performing in public, the boundaries between bodies and space were dissolved in the sense of a holistic approach. Her slogan was “Become one with eternity. Obliterate your personality. Become part of your environment.” 8 She started working with a regular troupe of dancers, dubbed herself the “queen of love and polka dots,” and performed so-called Anatomic Explosion Happenings with an overtly sociopolitical tenor.9 At a time when the United States was involved in the Vietnam War, Kusama also wanted to focus attention on young people who, with the integrity of their naked bodies, stood up to the insanity of war.

She organized most of these not officially approved Happenings at prominent and thematically related places, such as in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park and the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, on the Brooklyn Bridge, and even in front of the New York Board of Elections (cat. p. 164; figs. pp. 182, 185)—followed by an open letter to Richard Nixon. The press, usually strategically informed in advance, ensured that the events were widely publicized (figs. 25, 27).

Kusama subsequently expanded her activities into various fields. She opened a fashion boutique, for example, with her own, eccentrically revealing designs and published Kusama Presents an Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty, an erotic magazine (fig. 28). In 1970, she traveled to Japan to attend Expo ’70 in Osaka, but found her performances completely misunderstood by the encrusted, male-dominated society there. In New York, by contrast, counterculture and sexual liberation had already passed their peak. Nonconformist ideas met with a resurgent establishment, also in the art world, prompting Kusama to among other things write a critical statement titled “Museum Politics” (fig. 26). During this period, the artist’s mental health once again posed increasing challenges. Notably, she developed a connection with Joseph Cornell, the idiosyncratic yet highly esteemed artist renowned for his surrealist object boxes. Cornell was likewise known for the friendships he cultivated with several female artists and ballerinas throughout his career. Kusama met Cornell in the early 1960s through the art dealer Gertrude Stein. After becoming friends, the two developed an intense relation 34 ship marked by a deep mutual appreciation (fig. 29). Kusama frequently visited Cornell, and they exchanged letters and notes. He supported her not only emotionally but also financially, purchasing several of her early gouache paintings. Their close bond endured until Cornell’s death, in late 1972. A few months after his passing, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 due to her deteriorating health. Ultimately, she decided to remain there permanently.

Though she was in and out of hospitals in the following years, Kusama made ceramic sculptures as well as a series of collages reminiscent of her poetically surreal works from the 1950s and intensified her writing activities. In 1974 her father died, two years after Cornell, which probably had an additional effect on her fragile mental condition. It is therefore not surprising that her first two solo exhibitions after her return to Japan, in 1975 and 1976, were titled Message of Death from Hades and Obsessional Art, A Requiem for Death and Life. In 1977, Kusama had to return to a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo and decided to stay there voluntarily. Her condition improved noticeably; she resumed her artistic work and eventually set up a studio within walking distance of the hospital.

In 1978 Kusama’s first novel was published: Manhattan Suicide Addict, a fictionalized autobiographical story about her New York years. More than ten novels and short stories were to follow, as well as numerous poems and her autobiography, first published in Japanese in 2002.10 Many characters in her fictional works struggle with situations and mental states similar to those in Kusama’s own experience, such as obsessive behaviors, hallucinatory visions, or depersonalization. According to the artist’s own assessment, it was above all the negative feelings of mental pain, loss, and death hidden within her that found expression in her literary work.

At the same time, in the late 1970s, she began to experiment intensively with printmaking and also increasingly used concrete motifs such as f lowers, butterflies, pumpkins, and shoes to create images that were both direct and poetic. She worked on sculptural box constructions, as a continuation of her Accumulation sculptures; many were filled with snake-like forms and often assembled as repetitive grid structures to create monumental objects (cat. pp. 212–13; fig. 32). Beginning in the late 1980s, these works were followed by paintings with abstract all over compositions in bright acrylic colors, some of which the artist arranged into multi-panel paintings, suggesting an endless expanse. One of the repetitive motifs, which varies in size and shape, forms a sperm-like pattern whose teeming abundance seems to embody a basic principle of life. These new paintings were shown in numerous exhibi tions during that time, and in 1993, twenty-seven years after presenting her anarchically ingenious installation Narcissus Garden, Kusama was invited to be the first contemporary woman artist to represent Japan in a solo show at the 45th Venice Biennale. Finally, toward the end of the century, the large-scale exhibition Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958−1968 illustrated the ever-growing international appreciation of the artist. It showed at North American venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. There an additional exhibition, titled In Full Bloom: Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan, presented works from before and after her New York period.

The range of equally spectacular and coherent works that Kusama has created over the last few decades is well known and shall only be mentioned briefly here. They include a large number of different, sometimes site-specific installations. Probably the most prominent group, her so-called Infinity Mirror Rooms, has its roots as far back as 1965, when Kusama first evoked the intense feeling of endless repetition with her Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, a room whose walls were entirely mirrored. Over the course of her career, she has produced an increasing number of such kaleidoscopic virtual spaces, ranging from small peep-show-like cubes to large multimedia installations, each with its own interpretation of human existence in relation to the infinite.

In 1996 the artist also staged another form of spatial experience with her first balloon installation, Dots Obsession. Here, huge biomorphic, yellow inflatable objects with black dots dominated a walk-in space whose floor, ceiling, and walls were covered with the same pattern—a play on size relations and spatial awareness and again the beginning of a whole category of works. Recently, as in Kusama’s installation for this exhibition (cat. pp. 284–85), her Infinity Mirror Room and the surrounding, corresponding inflatable objects and patterns covering the floor, ceiling, and walls have sometimes entered into a complex, nested connection that turns the viewer’s immersive experience into a flowing modulated process.

But perhaps one of the most disturbing environments in its refined simplicity and diffuse closeness to reality was first created by Kusama in 2000. With I’m Here, but Nothing (cat. pp. 244–45), she devised a dreamlike, hallucinatory ambience, an everyday domestic interior bathed in black light and decorated with hundreds of fluorescent dot stickers. In the resulting intermediate realm of reality and surreal perception, this work is once again a congenial translation of the art ist’s own psychic states of mind.

As in the sometimes-gigantic inflatable objects in her Dots Obsession installations and her outdoor sculptures from the mid-1990s on, Kusama plays with unusual proportions and the resulting irritations and changes in perception, to the point of prompting us to question our own physicality as the measure of all things. In these works, the artist has the pumpkins and flowers blooming in lush radiance mutate, at times to a gigantic scale, such that the familiar representational nature of these gentle plant creatures, combined with the extreme distortion of scale, heightens the impression of a displaced reality. Confronted with such disorienting dimensions, we are spontaneously reminded of Alice in Wonderland.

Kusama’s increased focus on representational motifs can also be seen in her extensive production of paintings over the past two decades, starting with the Love Forever series, executed in black marker beginning in 2004, and her large series My Eternal Soul with its vibrant colors, and continuing with the ongoing group of works she creates under the overall title Every Day I Pray for Love. While she previously used her polka dots and Infinity Nets to translate her own inner feelings into abstract imagery and process them in this way, her being in the world is now often reflected in her depiction of concrete images such as plants, suns, female profiles, or paths. According to her own statement, these works, not least of all, also contain motifs and imagery from her youth, coming full circle in a never-ending abundance of Kusama’s messages to the world.

In Kusama’s work, the never-ending is more than a motif—it is a philosophy, a spatial principle, and a psychological truth. It echoes the cease less loops of thought, the repetition of form, and the cycle of life and death that underpin her entire practice. Infinity, in Kusama’s universe, is not abstract—it is lived. Her artistic world is structured around the logic of endless repetition, boundless space, eternal return. Through it, she dissolves the divide between the self and the universe. In Kusama’s world, the infinite is not distant. It is here, now—unfolding endlessly.

1 Yayoi Kusama, “Yayoi Kusama on love, hope and the power of art,” interview by Megan C. Hills, Wallpaper*, March 22, 2023, https://www. wallpaper.com/art/yayoi-kusama-interview (accessed May 20, 2025).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Yayoi Kusama, “An interview with Yayoi Kusama: ‘I never run out of ideas,’” USA Art News, January 3, 2023, https://usaartnews.com/news/an-interview- with-yayoi-kusama-i-never-run-out-of-ideas (accessed May 16, 2025).

5 Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy (2011; repr. London, 2018), p. 77.

6 Ibid., p. 23.

7 Ibid., p. 42.

8 Yayoi Kusama, flyer for Self-Obliteration at The Gate Theater, New York, June 16–17, 1967. Original in the artist’s archive.

9 See also Helen Westgeest’s essay on Kusama’s Happenings in this volume, pp. 180–85.

10 On Kusama’s literary work, see Ralph McCarthy’s essay in this volume, pp. 248–54.

You may click below link to reach and buy Yayoi Kusama’s Fondation Beyeler exhibition catalog to read below essays:

- Like a Plant by Stefano Mancuso

- I Have Seen the Big Bang. It Looks Like Polka Dots. by Katie Mack

- Portraits of the Artist: Yayoi Kusama Performing for the Camera by SooJin Lee

- Yayoi Kusama, or the Metamorphosis of Fashion by Emanuele Coccia

- Accumulation, Obliteration, and Nudity Merging with Hippie Counterculture:

Yayoi Kusama’s Sociopolitical Happenings by Helen Westgeest

- Kusama Lit: Outlasting the Devil by Ralph McCarthy

- Struggle and Wanderings of My Soul (excerpt) by Yayoi Kusama

- Poems: A Selection by Yayoi Kusama

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December 24, 2025

YAYOI KUSAMA AT FONDATION BEYELER