Yayoi Kusama's last show opens without her: Amsterdam unveils new Infinity Mirrored Room in tribute to the artist who died at 97

A major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama's work opens at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum on Friday, three weeks after the Japanese artist's death, the Associated Press reported. What was planned as a survey of her seven-decade career has become a posthumous tribute.

Kusama died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97, her studio announced later in the month. David Zwirner, the gallery that represented her, said the cause was multiple organ failure. The Stedelijk had been preparing the show for months as the final stop of a European tour.

Also read: Yayoi Kusama, who splashed polka dots across art world, dies at 97


"We heard about her passing," curator Leontine Coelewij told AP. "We decided to make it really a tribute. A tribute to her life. Tribute to her work, so that everybody can see what she is ... to us. So many wonderful works."

Her dots reach visitors before they enter. They are painted across the museum's facade and wrapped in red fabric around trees on the adjacent Museum Square.

At the centre of the show is an installation built specially for the exhibition, titled "Infinity Mirrored Room: The Hope Of The Polka Dots Buried In Infinity Will Eternally Cover The Universe". Yellow tentacles patterned with dots curl through the space, the pattern repeating on the floor and walls, with mirrors dissolving the edges of the room. Visitors reach it by an escalator lined with mirrors.

"There's a lot of mirrors, there's tentacles, there's a lot of colour, and it's a ... you can say hallucinating world. You really step into her mind," Coelewij told AP. It is her favourite part of the show.

Dots as survival

Coelewij said the dots began as a way for Kusama to process hallucinations she experienced from childhood. "So a lot of her work comes from these mental issues that she had," she said. "And I think she made something beautiful out of it for her. It was also a way to explore ideas about infinity, for instance, like, how do we relate to the universe, to the cosmos, to the world around us?"

Born in Matsumoto in 1929 into a family that ran a seed nursery, Kusama described in her autobiography seeing a red flower pattern from a tablecloth spread across the ceiling, windows and pillars of a room until it covered her body. She moved to New York in the late 1950s, worked alongside Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Cornell, and returned to Japan in the 1970s. She had lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital since 1977, working from a studio nearby. Her studio said she continued painting until her final days.

Among the works on show is a large pumpkin in fibre-reinforced plastic and polyurethane paint, its yellow surface covered in black dots of varying size.

The Dutch chapter

Kusama's link to the Netherlands runs deep. She was active in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities in the 1960s, and her work sat close to the ZERO movement founded by German artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in the late 1950s. She featured in a landmark ZERO exhibition at the Stedelijk itself in 1965. A photograph from it shows her in a white kimono among the movement's artists, nearly all men in suits and ties.

In a 1967 happening, she covered the naked body of Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven in painted dots inside the chapel of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam near Rotterdam.

"She really liked the whole atmosphere in the Netherlands, which was rather open and tolerant, liberal," Coelewij said. "She was also part of the counterculture of that moment, the hippie culture. You know, Amsterdam was the magical centre, and she felt very much at home here."

A tour that outlived her

The retrospective spans more than seven decades and moves through painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, fashion, collage and documentation of her happenings. It was organised with the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, which showed it from October 2025 to January 2026, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where it ran from March to August 2026 and became that museum's most-visited exhibition, drawing about 450,000 people. The Stedelijk is the third and last venue.

Kusama's market made her one of the most commercially successful artists of her generation. Her auction record stands at $10.5 million, set at Phillips in New York in 2022 for the 1959 painting "Untitled (Nets)". She was for a period the most expensive living female artist at auction, and her collaborations with Louis Vuitton pushed her motifs well beyond the gallery circuit. Tributes after her death came from Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and artist Yoshitomo Nara, who posted "RIP Kusama-sensei".

Ten years ago, Kusama said she felt her life was nearing its end but that she was "still fighting to the death for my art". She added: "I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead."

The exhibition runs at the Stedelijk from September 11 until January 17, 2027.

(With inputs from AP)