Celebrating the Legacy of Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk Museum

A major museum retrospective surveying seven decades of artmaking by the late Yayoi Kusama is currently travelling across Europe, leaving a trail of the iconic artist’s signature polka dots in its wake. From September 11, 2026, to January 17, 2027, the landmark exhibition makes its final stop at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where it will become a tribute celebrating her life and her work.

Kusama, who died in Tokyo at 97 on August 14, was widely regarded as one of the world’s most commercially successful woman artists. This touring retrospective has already attracted more than half a million visitors—and counting—across Basel and Cologne, and the artist’s preceding retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne was the highest-attended ticketed art exhibition ever staged in Australia. At the handful of museums worldwide that have installed Infinity Mirror Rooms, visitors routinely wait in line for hours to spend less than a minute inside.

Infinity Mirrored Room – ‘The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe’, 2025. Photo by Mark Niedermann. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama poses in ‘Untitled (Dress)’ with her phallic sculptures in her New York studio, 1971. Photo by Tom Haar. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama, ‘Everything about My Love’, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 194 x 194 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts. © YAYOI KUSAMA

The centrepiece of the Stedelijk presentation is a newly commissioned Infinity Mirror Room, which will make its European debut in Amsterdam. It is presented alongside more than 300 works produced by Kusama over her prolific lifetime, spanning installation, painting, sculpture, performance, fashion, and literature. Her remarkable life story unfolds through early works made in her hometown of Matsumoto, Japan, groundbreaking avant-garde creations from her time in the United States in the 1960s, and more recent productions from her home in Tokyo, where she resided in a psychiatric institution since the 1970s.

Kusama’s work responds directly to her traumatic childhood and subsequent struggles with mental illness, which caused her to experience visual and auditory hallucinations and obsessive thoughts. Despite its deeply autobiographical nature, her artwork resonates on a universal level.

The artist spoke often of her quest for “self-obliteration,” which she attempted to achieve by covering people, objects, and spaces entirely with stippled dots until the boundaries between self and surroundings dissolved. For Kusama, this act of depersonalization was a path toward collective connection with the universe. “I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live,” she once said.

Yayoi Kusama around the age of ten, ca. 1939. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – ‘Illusion Inside the Heart’, 2025. Mirror-polished stainless steel with glass mirrors and colored acrylic, 300 × 300 × 300 cm, inside view. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama working on ‘My Eternal Soul’ (2009–21), 2014. Photo courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

It is perhaps ironic that Kusama’s surging popularity in the age of social media has been bolstered by the infinitely Instagrammable nature of her work. As The New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote in a 2019 review, “The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.” But the ubiquity of Kusama’s appeal among influencers should not be seen as a turn-off, even if their protruding selfie sticks may affect the transportive quality of the intended experience. While the depths of Kusama’s Infinity rooms are illusions, the scope of her influence is certainly not.

This fact has not always been acknowledged. In 1965, Kusama made her first mirrored-room installation in New York. Just a few months later, a more established artist, Lucas Samaras, took a sudden pivot in his practice and presented his own mirrored-room installation at a more prestigious gallery. Kusama was devastated by what she interpreted as outright plagiarism and attempted suicide, jumping out of a window.

Yayoi Kusama amid her installation ‘Narcissus Garden’ at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama, ‘Every Day I Pray for Love’, 2023. Acrylic and marker pen on canvas, 60.6 x 50.0 cm. Collection of the artist. Photo courtesy of Ota Fine Arts. © YAYOI KUSAMA

 

Yayoi Kusama, ‘Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show’, 1963. Rowboat and oars covered by plaster castings in white cotton, a pair of women’s shoes, and black-and white posters; boat. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, gift of the artist. © YAYOI KUSAMA

She has accused other leading figures in the male-dominated New York art scene of ripping her off: Andy Warhol presented his Cow Wallpaper (1966) after Kusama included boat-patterned wallpaper in her Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), and Claes Oldenburg made his soft sculptures of domestic objects after Kusama pioneered the idea with her Accumulation series of 1962. (In case you were wondering, Kusama’s dots did not inspire Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings—that was another unsung woman artist, Janet Sobel.)

With the support of friends, colleagues, and doctors, and sustained by her own unwavering determination to keep creating, Kusama transformed profound personal suffering into one of the most extraordinary artistic careers of the past century. Her work has brought wonder, solace, and meaning to millions around the world. Along the way, she was an outspoken advocate for ending war, a champion of LGBTQ+ rights, and a trailblazer, becoming the first solo artist to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Now that she has passed away, interest in her oeuvre will likely surge again, as will attendance numbers for the final leg of the last exhibition she made while alive.

Like the sense of eternity her Infinity Rooms inspired, Kusama’s ambition was boundless. “I am deeply moved that so many people have been my fans,” Kusama said in an interview in the late 1990s. “I have been grappling with art as a therapy for my disease, but I suppose I would not be able to know how people would evaluate my art until after I die. I create art for the healing of all mankind.”

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