Yayoi Kusama Is Still One of Our Most Important Artists

You don’t always need an invitation to show up at the party – at least according to Yayoi Kusama. Without being formally asked to the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, Kusama unilaterally installed Narcissus Garden (1966/2025) on the grass outside the Italian Pavilion, having been lent US$600 dollars by Lucio Fontana to produce the piece. One thousand five hundred silver mirror orbs made a glinting reflective field, endlessly mirroring the titillated onlookers. Kusama stood alongside the work dressed in a shimmering golden kimono, selling off the balls for US$2 each. The biennale organizers quickly banned Kusama from making these sales, likening them to an ice cream stall. Today, these same delectable orbs drift in and out of configurations within the water lily pond at Fondation Beyeler, a seductive encounter in an otherwise hit-and-miss retrospective of Kusama’s eight-decade career.

The artist’s signature polka dots and nets (semi-circular brushstrokes in lace-like patterns) represent her search for self-obliteration and infinity and have become as synonymous with Kusama as the drip is to Jackson Pollock or the zip to Barnett Newman. From her early childhood in Matsumoto, Kusama experienced hallucinations of light flashes, fields of dots and auras; these deliria have followed her throughout her life. She described an episode in her youth where ‘after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern … my body was caught in that terrifying infinity net.’ Translating internalized terror into a perceptible, externalized lexicon, Kusama has not only rendered her visions ubiquitously recognizable, but has also essentially democratized them so that anyone can both see through and embody her lens.

The exhibition aims to introduce a wider audience to the full depth of Kusama’s practice, though it only partially achieves this goal. The opening rooms are a delight in the sheer density and diversity of the early drawings and paintings – a lesser-known aspect of Kusama’s work. These include Untitled (1939), a remarkably prescient graphite-on-paper drawing by a ten-year-old Kusama that depicts a person with her eyes closed (a young Kusama seeing red flowers?), dots spreading across the entire surface plane and doubling as heavy rainfall that blurs the boundaries between people and their surroundings. The precision of other graphite drawings like Taihaku Leaves (1948) – delicate studies of cherry trees with dense shading that defines every stem, vein, curve and bud – is also revelatory, as is the oil-and-enamel painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization) (1950), a vortex-like mass of undulating reddish-brown sinews that recalls flesh and directs the viewer’s gaze towards the centre, where two skeletal trees sit in isolation. The painting has a spatial quality: it is an enclosure with a spherical doorway, a two-dimensional precursor to Kusama’s ‘Infinity Mirrored Rooms’ (1965–ongoing).

Bringing together an impressive group of her large-scale ‘Infinity Net’ paintings (1958–2010s), an intimate room of these works enfolds you as you walk through. Here, The Pacific Ocean (1958) delineates an intricate and hypnotic white net upon a black expanse, symbolizing the enormity of the ocean that Kusama gazed upon when flying from Japan to live in the United States (where she was based between 1958 and 1973). Yet it is the next room, which holds a series of anthropomorphic, phalli-like soft ‘Accumulations’ and macaroni sculptures that Kusama developed in the US through the 1960s and 1970s that is the highlight of this show. From Phallic Girl (1967) – a silver spray-painted mannequin covered in fabric stuffed taut with cotton to recall coral, and more overtly, phalli – to Untitled (Dress) (ca. 1968) ­– a fuchsia pink mini dress embroidered with thick clusters of silver phalli – these recurring motifs covered boats, chairs, shoes, frying pans, baking trays, tables – you name it! – and expressed what Kusama described as an all-pervasive ‘fear of sex’, which resulted from trauma after her mother ask her to spy on her father having sex with other women.

Kusama’s fashion is a sublime and underexplored aspect of her work, which really deserves its own focused exhibition. At the Fondation Beyeler, a joyful selection of clothing and accessories is plastered with macaroni and painted in bronze and silver like Macaroni Dress (1964), Macaroni Handbag (1965), Macaroni Pants (1968) and Untitled (Brassier) (1964–67). All of these are shown alongside Kusama’s (covetable) fabric tunics from the mid-1960s: short dresses with winged sleeves covered with delicately hand-painted infinity nets. During this period, Kusama gravitated towards countercultural movements including the anti-Vietnam War protests and the sexual revolution. She also staged numerous Happenings that often featured her garments. In the Naked Happenings (1967–68), Kusama painted multi-coloured polka dots directly onto people’s skin, culminating in the film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967), which is a mesmeric pastiche of these energized performances. The era defines Kusama as an artist whose radical visual language placed a finger on the pulse of culture.

It is from here on, however, that the show begins to unravel, with only sparse examples of Kusama’s pumpkin motifs from the 1980s onwards, and relatively few paintings from the ‘My Eternal Soul’ (2009–21) and ‘Every Day I Pray for Love’ (2021–ongoing) series. She has spent well over a decade working daily on the hundreds of paintings that make up these series, which ultimately make an impression en masse thanks more to their poetic titles and sheer size as opposed to the somewhat kitsch eyes, faces, dots, nets and amorphous patterns that consume the bright canvases. And it is hard not to drift into despondency when attempting to tackle the new ‘Infinity Mirrored Room’, which overcompensates with its elaborate title, The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2025). I’ll give you three words – yellow, inflatable, tendril – and leave you with the suggestion that this work would be better situated in the nearby theme park Europa-Park, a mere hour’s drive away. The line between entertainment, experientialism and art becomes too blurred here (a subject for another text entirely).

Now 96 years old, Kusama has been prolific; she still paints daily and has rightly become a household name and a ‘blockbuster’ crowd-pulling artist. In light of this, the curatorial decision to devote the final vast room of this retrospective to a small vitrine of Kusama’s books (from 1984 to the late-1990s she published 20 novels and short-story collections, including two poetry books), three tiny wall-mounted screens displaying a series of short video works, and two hanging screens with projections of archival documentary photographs genuinely baffled me. Wondering if I’d stumbled into an incomplete room, I was left with the feeling that Kusama’s output simply petered out, which is far from the case and does a disservice to one of our most important living artists.

‘Yayoi Kusama’ is on view at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, until 25 January

_{Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden, 1966/2025, installation view. © Yayoi Kusama; photograph: Matthias Willi}