El Universal reported that the official website of Yayoi Kusama announced on August 26 the death of the Japanese artist at age 97. The publication noted that she died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital, without disclosing the cause of death.
Born in Matsumoto on March 22, 1929, Kusama was one of the most significant artists of the past century and a central figure in psychedelia, with a career spanning visual arts, performance, fiction, and poetry. For Mexican audiences, her name became synonymous with the retrospective 'Yayoi Kusama. Infinite Obsession,' presented at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City between 2014 and 2015, as part of a Latin American tour that also traveled to Argentina and Brazil and drew more than two million visitors. The Washington Post published an obituary on August 26 as well, describing her as a member of the 1960s avant-garde and as an artist who moved from near-obscurity to the most important museums in the world.
The statement on her website described her as a 'pioneering avant-garde artist' and affirmed that she 'kept painting until her final days, never setting down the brush.' In 2006, she became the first woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, one of the most prestigious international art prizes in the world. She began painting around the age of ten, with the obsessive repetition of polka dots, nets, and arches as her central motifs, and in her later decades found global fame with her 'infinity rooms,' mirror chambers of infinite dots that drew mass audiences at museums around the world.
The announcement described a life 'entirely devoted to artistic creation.' With a retrospective that drew more than two million visitors across Latin America, her legacy is measured in numbers, and that audience still has in museums a doorway back into her mirror rooms.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.