Art · London
Yayoi Kusama Dies at 97, and Tate Counts What She Meant to It
Tate's interim director called her 'an immensely important artist to Tate', whose Infinity Mirror Rooms drew almost a million visitors in three years.
Yayoi Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, aged 97. The announcement went up on her official site on 27 August, signed by two entities — Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. — and gives no cause of death. It says she 'continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush'. NPR, reporting the day before, said her representative, the gallerist David Zwirner, gave the cause as multiple organ failure.
Tate published its tribute on 27 August, headed simply 'Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026)'. Karin Hindsbo, Tate's interim director, said: 'One of the world's best-known contemporary artists, Kusama's pioneering work spanned an incredible seven decades, much of which reflected her utterly unique vision of the world.' Then the line that belongs to this city. Kusama, Hindsbo said, 'was an immensely important artist to Tate' — and 'more recently her Infinity Mirror Rooms became our most visited show of all time, welcoming almost a million visitors in three years'.
Tate interim director Karin Hindsbo: 'Her Infinity Mirror Rooms became our most visited show of all time, welcoming almost a million visitors in three years.'
That was a specific London phenomenon with a start and an end. 'Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms' ran at Tate Modern from 18 May 2021 to 28 April 2024 — three years at £10 a ticket, free to members, in The George Economou Gallery on Bankside. It paired 'Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life', which Tate calls one of Kusama's largest installations to date and which was made for her 2012 Tate Modern retrospective, with 'Chandelier of Grief'. Hindsbo's statement quoted Kusama on what those rooms did: they 'opened up a world of fantasy and freedom'.
The London relationship ran far longer than one show. Victoria Miro first exhibited her at its Cork Street gallery from 18 November 1998 — nearly 28 years ago — and billed its September 2024 show as Kusama's fourteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Its artist page now reads 'Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026)'. She represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in October 2017. Tate illustrated its tribute with a work from 1965: 'Infinity Mirror Room–Phalli's Field'.