Few artists in art history have enjoyed such widespread recognition during their lifetime as Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929. At 96 years old, this living legend continues to work actively, cementing her status as a global art icon alongside Van Gogh, Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Frida Kahlo. Major luxury brands compete for collaborations with her, as demonstrated by Louis Vuitton's spectacular 15-meter-tall statue of the artist covered in her signature colorful polka dots, installed outside La Samaritaine facing Pont Neuf in spring 2023, holding an elegant L.V.-branded handbag.
To prevent this multi-talented artist's work and precious messages from being overshadowed by her commercial collaborations, art enthusiasts are encouraged to visit Basel for a deeper understanding of both her artwork and persona. The Beyeler Foundation, nestled among fields, pastures, and vineyards, now houses Kusama's work in a comprehensive exhibition that showcases seven decades of creation from an artist who has consistently distinguished herself from all artistic movements.
The exhibition brings together more than 300 works spanning from the 1950s to today, sourced from Japan, Singapore, and several European countries, with 130 pieces never before shown in Europe. This marks the first major European retrospective since the Centre Pompidou exhibition fourteen years ago. The works are displayed throughout the museum's luminous temporary exhibition spaces and extend into the museum gardens, where several three-dimensional installations have been specially positioned.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, into a bourgeois family that built their fortune in the noble profession of plant nursery business. This early immersion in the bustling, living world of trees and vegetation undoubtedly sparked her love for walks in the surrounding countryside. Nature captivated her from her youngest age and would profoundly influence her later creation, as evidenced by the omnipresent polka dots, flowers, and pumpkins in her work, along with a multitude of repetitive and exuberant motifs and forms inspired by the plant world.
Around age ten, Kusama experienced her first hallucinations while in the family home. "I saw the entire room, my whole body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers. At that very moment, my soul felt erased. I then had the impression of being restored, of returning to infinity, to eternal times and absolute space," she wrote in her 2002 autobiography "Infinity Net." In 1950, she created her first self-portrait featuring a pink dot on a black background bordered by petals, like a stemless flower, which visitors can admire in one of the exhibition's first rooms.
This motif – the polka dot – repeated infinitely, became her signature. These same proliferations of dots, reproduced on canvases, were what she exhibited in 1959 in New York, where she had settled in 1957 to escape conflicts with her mother and Japan's conservative, patriarchal, and suffocating society, still wounded by World War II. Her works from the 1950s reveal her fears and traumas, such as "Corpses" (1950), an inextricable network of brown-colored ropes, twisted and filled with knots, or "Screaming Girl" (1952), depicting a wide-open mouth and hallucinated eyes reminiscent of Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
This same battle between life and death appears in "Atomic Bomb" (1954), representing an enormous and terrifying red and black mushroom rising against a luminous cream-colored background – an anguished memory of the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kusama was then 16 years old. From the early 1960s, she sought to conjure other fears through her Soft Sculptures and Accumulations, such as "One Thousand Boats Show" (1963), a boat adorned with countless white phallic protuberances.
These profusions of penises, far from being an apology for unbridled sexuality, were actually a means for her to express her fear of sex. This panic fear was caused by childhood memories when her mother asked her to spy on her philandering father during his adulterous affairs. Integrated into New York's cultural scene, Kusama engaged in counterculture movements during 1967-1969, multiplying happenings with her famous "Anatomic Explosions" series in emblematic city locations.
On July 14, 1968 – the date of a famous revolution – four young naked men and women performed to the sound of bongos at the feet of George Washington's statue near the New York Stock Exchange, while the artist painted a multitude of blue dots on their bodies. This pacifist performance, "Love and Peace," aimed to denounce the interminable Vietnam War. During another happening organized a few months later in October 1968 on Wall Street, she encouraged participants to "obliterate" the Stock Exchange, "which impoverishes workers," under a profusion of dots.
Her "Self Obliterations" showing Kusama's body covered with a multitude of colored dots, visible in room 5 of the exhibition route, in no way evokes self-annihilation or elimination but, on the contrary, represents consciousness of being part of a Greater Whole, a network of interconnected dots to which all human beings are connected. This same message is carried by her painting series titled "My Eternal Soul," which she has been working on since 2009.
This series recalls the universe of Australian Aboriginal paintings. These acrylic works with brilliant colors, mixing faces, flowers, and pairs of eyes, evoke once again the profound interconnection between Man and the Cosmos, between microcosm and macrocosm. Kusama strives to bring to life, in these jubilant poetic oils, the invisible forces and rhythms that animate Nature. In 2021, at age 92, she launched a new series, "Every Day I Pray for Love," a joyful ensemble of small-format paintings incorporating fragments of poems in English or Japanese.
These works reflect the artist's intimate conviction that imagination possesses the power to transform the world and that art has the capacity to heal. "As an artist," she writes, "I think it is important to deliver a message of love, peace, and hope to those who suffer, and to leave this message of eternal love to younger generations." The comprehensive retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen/Basel runs from October 12, 2025, to January 25, 2026, offering visitors an unparalleled opportunity to experience the full scope of Kusama's extraordinary artistic journey.
