Biography

Born in Matsumo in the Nagano region of Japan, Kusama’s parents were both seed farmers. Kusama had very little formal training, and only attended the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts for a year in 1948, likely the result of her parents not being particularly supportive of her artistic pursuits.

She began working in a military factory at age 13 where she sewed parachutes for the Japanese army. Working here provided her with the realisation of the importance of personal freedom and creative licence, with escapism featuring as an important underlying element to her work.

As an artist, Kusama amassed considerable fame in Japan before her move to the United States, holding her first solo show in 1952. Upon her move to New York, her first commercial works were actually watercolours, such as The Woman (1953), which demonstrated her move towards American artistic influences such as abstraction. The work depicts a biomorphic form containing the dots that would then come to define the artist’s oeuvre.

By 1956 however, Kusama had expanded her painting from purely gouache, watercolours and oils on paper, to painting polka dots directly onto household surfaces, including the walls and the floors of rooms. This is when we also see her begin to paint directly onto naked assistants, which would also become a defining feature of her performance works in the following decade.

In terms of painting, Kusama became an immediate staple of the New York Avant Garde following her Infinity Net works that she began upon her arrival to the city. The obsessively repeated marks that define these paintings are considered a precursor to the minimalist movement, and in the 1960s her work was exhibited alongside big names such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Clas Oldenburg.

The first of Kusama’s widespread internationally successful performance works was also in 1966, with Narcissus Garden. Unofficially displayed at the 33rd Biennale, the piece contained 1500 plastic reflective globes which, after being placed on the lawn outside the Italian pavilion, were then sold individually by the artist herself to visitors. Though the performance was shut down by Biennale officials, it has since been recommissioned and created in various international settings. 

Kusama started experiencing hallucinations during her childhood and these visions would usually involve fields of polka dots, which were to later become a defining motif in her work. She was also known for drawing pumpkins in her earlier childhood which again became an enduring subject. Describing these visions as “flashes of light, auras or dense fields of dots,” these visions provided an enduring influence over her artistic output.

The artist has also made no secret of the fact that art has played a significant role in her healing process in terms of mental health and in confronting her own personal phobias. A key example of this is found in her 1960s 'Soft Sculptures,' namely her Accumulation series. Here, Kusama transforms pieces of household furniture into sexualised objects covered in phallic forms, which she states are supposed to be confrontations of her sexual phobias and anxiety caused by exposure to her father’s philandering as a child.

Kusama currently holds the record for the highest auction price for any living female artist, with her 1990 painting Pumpkin selling for £170,000 at Phillips auction house alongside a sizable £400,000 at Christies for her Infinity Netsfrom 2006. The most expensive Kusama work ever sold was her Interminable Net no.4,(1959) which brought in over $6.7million at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019.