Yayoi Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August at age 97, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc announced. The statement said she painted until her final days and described a lifetime devoted to visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry. Kusama became instantly recognisable by a bright red bob and for psychedelic polka-dot paintings, phallic soft sculptures and immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms. Her work drew on lifelong hallucinations that began in childhood; she was born in Matsumoto in 1929 and left Japan for New York in 1958. In the 1960s she staged provocative performances and began the infinity net paintings and soft sculptures; she sold her first infinity net in 1962 to Frank Stella and Donald Judd for $75. Kusama lived for decades in a psychiatric hospital yet reached superstar status later in life, with her 2024 show in Australia recorded as the most popular exhibition in that country’s history. The artist’s 2014 White No 28 sold for $7.1 million, a record then for a living female artist.