NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner announced the passing of Yayoi Kusama. The artist passed away from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97.
Kusama devoted her life to an international career as an avant-garde artist, working primarily in the visual arts while also extending her practice to performance, novels, poetry, and other forms of expression. She continued to paint until shortly before her passing, never setting aside her brush, and remained steadfast in her lifelong belief that love can save the world.
David Zwirner states:
Its been one of the great privileges of my professional life to have been able to represent Yayoi Kusamas extraordinary art for the last fifteen years. The last time Kusama visited New York, a city where she lived for many years, was in 2013. During that visit, she opened the first of many exhibitions in our galleries that had hour-long lines for the chance to experience her work. Her steadfast message of love and peace has now reached millions of admirers around the globe. At the time of her passing, Kusama was, without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world.
Earlier this summer, I was reminded again of Kusamas genius when I visited her career retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; the exhibition presented more than 300 works, from her childhood drawings to the present. Kusamas art influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art, and performance art; more recently her large-scale installations single-handedly pioneered what is now referred to as experiential art. Shortly after my visit to the Museum Ludwig, they announced that this exhibition had become the most successful in its history. Kusama must have been pleased to read this. I will miss her terribly.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929, Kusama held her first solo show there in 1952. In the mid-1960s she established herself in New York as a leading avant-garde artist through groundbreaking performances, happenings, events, and exhibitions. Her work gained widespread recognition in 1989 with solo shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. She represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 to critical acclaim, and in 1998 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-organized Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 19581968, which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
Since the late 1990s, her museum shows have drawn record crowds, and her global fame has grown alongside Instagram, where her work is shared by millions. From 2012 to 2015, three major solo presentations traveled simultaneously through Japan, Asia, and Central and South America; one of them, Infinite Obsession, drew nearly two million visitors across Buenos Aires MALBA-Fundacin Costantini and Rios Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil before opening at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. A 201112 retrospective traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2012 and 2023, Yayoi Kusama collaborated with Louis Vuitton on special collections.
In 2016, Kusama was named to TIME Magazines 100 Most Influential People. From 2017 to 2019, the survey Infinity Mirrors traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, where it drew a record 475,000 visitors to the museum, followed by the Seattle Art Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Cleveland Museum of Art; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
In New York, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature was on view at The New York Botanical Garden in 2021, and in 2023 her commissioned mosaic A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe (2022) went on permanent view at Grand Centrals Madison Concourse. Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and 2024, and a comprehensive retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (20242025) became the highest-attended ticketed exhibition in the museums history with 570,537 visitors.
In 2016, Kusama was named to TIME Magazines 100 Most Influential People. From 2017 to 2019, the survey Infinity Mirrors traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, where it drew a record 475,000 visitors to the museum, followed by the Seattle Art Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Cleveland Museum of Art; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
In New York, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature was on view at The New York Botanical Garden in 2021, and in 2023 her commissioned mosaic A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe (2022) went on permanent view at Grand Centrals Madison Concourse. Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and 2024, and a comprehensive retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (20242025) became the highest-attended ticketed exhibition in the museums history with 570,537 visitors.
In 2025, a major traveling European exhibition opened at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Baselthe first Kusama retrospective in Switzerland. The exhibition then traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, where it closed on August 2, 2026 with 480,335 visitors the most successful show in the museum's history. On September 11, 2026 the exhibition will open at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Kusama has been represented by David Zwirner since 2013, and the gallery has presented six solo exhibitions of Kusamas work (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023) at their New York galleries, each of which broke attendance records for the gallery.
