About a “little month” before the opening of the major Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam – a Dutch expression – the legendary Japanese artist died on 14 August 2026. Her studio remained silent for 13 days. The funeral took place before the official announcement, in an intimate ceremony attended by close relatives and members of the Foundation. Respecting the Japanese tradition of restraint, and without dwelling on this, we will turn instead to a bright, colourful, serious and thoughtful exhibition spanning 97 years of artistic life.

Kusama was one of the first women artists of Japanese origin with a psychiatric condition to achieve international fame during her lifetime. Early in her life, all three of these characteristics became obstacles to her career. Yet Kusama transformed them through her genius into strengths – moments of recognition, points of connection with the viewer and with an art world that underwent an extraordinary history during her almost century-long life. The “Kusama” exhibition in Amsterdam became the finest possible In Memoriam for an artist whose name Europeans still struggle to pronounce correctly (Yayoi or Yau), but whom everyone loved – and continues to love.

As Takako Fujibayashi, manager of Kusama’s Studio, said: “I still can’t come to terms with her death, but she left us such an extraordinary creative legacy that I feel she is still here with us.”

I can confirm that feeling: standing there, I too sensed her presence, although I am rather sceptical about anything esoteric.

The final, third stop of this major European retrospective, which first took place at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, then at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, is now on view in Amsterdam from 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027. The exhibition was prepared in close collaboration with Kusama Studio over a period of around four years. Its curator, Leontine Coelewij, emphasised that Yayoi herself followed the exhibition’s design throughout these years, approved its concept and took part in selecting and positioning the works.

Around 50 works in Amsterdam are being shown for the first time. Works were specially brought in from several Japanese museums, including institutions in Tokyo and Kusama’s home city of Matsumoto. And one more important figure – Stedelijk director Rein Wolfs said at the press opening, which I was lucky enough to attend, that the museum had never before devoted so much space to a single artist. Ninety-seven years of artistic life require a lot of square metres from a museum!

In my view, one of the strengths of this retrospective is that it deliberately shows the artist before she became the Kusama we know – with her signature polka dots, pumpkins and Infinity Rooms. Her childhood drawings are particularly revealing. One of them was made when she was around ten. Even at that age, we can already see motifs that would later become fundamental to her visual language – flowers, dots, repetition and the dissolution of the human figure into the surrounding space.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto into a prosperous, conservative family involved in the seed trade and plant nursery business. The family owned a large agricultural estate, growing plants, collecting seeds and selling them wholesale across Japan. There were fields and several greenhouses. By the standards of Matsumoto at the time, it was a substantial enterprise. The family was considered wealthy and enjoyed a high social status. Yayoi literally grew up among plants, flowers and seeds. She would take a notebook into the family fields and draw flowers. It was there, as a child, that she first encountered the natural forms that would later become part of her artistic vocabulary. When the hallucinations came, they would echo the visual world around her – seeds, the pattern of her mother’s skirt, Japanese prints.

Yayoi Kusama has another character she has remained faithful to for decades – the pumpkin. She fell in love with them as a child. Pumpkins grew in her family’s fields, and the girl remembered their strange, uneven, bumpy shapes. In the 1980s, this very ordinary vegetable, the yellow pumpkin covered in black polka dots has become almost a Kusama trademark, but behind its apparent simplicity lies her familiar method – take an everyday object and make it repeat, multiply and extend beyond itself.

In the Stedelijk retrospective, pumpkins appear alongside mirrors, polka dots, paintings and other dotted objects – looking as if Kusama had simply brought a piece of her childhood into the museum.

Yayoi’s father, Kamon Kusama, was involved in the family business but, according to the artist’s own recollections, led a rather free-spirited life and had numerous affairs. Her parents’ relationship was deeply troubled. Yayoi recalled that her mother would send her to spy on her father and his lovers. This family history offers a key to her troubled relationship with sexuality and the male body, later expressed in the phallic forms of her work.

From a very early age, then, Yayoi was a woman in a man’s world. A fearless woman.

There is also a remarkably cinematic episode in her biography, involving the male-dominated art world. In 1962, she showed Accumulation No. 1 in New York – an ordinary armchair completely covered with hundreds of hand-stitched “soft phalluses”. Soon afterwards, Claes Oldenburg, who had previously worked in a quite different manner, began making his famous soft sculptures. At the opening of one of his exhibitions, the artist’s wife, Patty Mucha, approached our heroine and said: “Yayoi, forgive us.” Kusama herself would later tell the story many times – of how her ideas were appropriated by better-known men on the New York art scene.

When the artist was 16 – a tender and vulnerable age, particularly for a girl – the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experience of a generation that lived through the war and entered the post-war world in the aftermath of Japan’s tragedy became one of the important layers of Kusama’s early artistic consciousness. The exhibition includes an early work featuring a mushroom cloud. The theme of death gradually becomes intertwined with the idea of infinite repetition – a single dot can be a fragment of human life, while an infinite multitude of dots can become an image of the Universe, in which individual existence dissolves.

This is where one of the most important stages of her Infinity Nets begins. These are the almost monochrome surfaces that Kusama built from an infinite number of tiny, repeated arcs. It is particularly fascinating to look beyond the “beautiful pattern” and notice the physical labour behind it – the surface is constructed through the repetition of the same gesture.

Kusama could spend days painting dots and strokes on the canvas, filling every inch of the surface, barely stopping to eat or sleep. Even looking at the Infinity Nets becomes a process.

“The hope that the polka dots buried in infinity will eternally cover the Universe.”

A special place in this retrospective is occupied by a work that firmly connects Kusama with the Stedelijk Museum – Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, created in 1963. At the centre of the installation is a real boat completely covered in soft white phallic forms, while the walls of the surrounding space are transformed into an endless repetition of its image. Two white women’s shoes at the bottom introduce a sense of personal presence into this mechanical system of accumulation.

For a feminist artist, this was a crucial step from the painted surface towards total space – a single object is multiplied until the individual thing dissolves into repetition.

The history of this work is particularly important in Amsterdam. Yayoi first appeared at the Stedelijk in 1962, taking part in an exhibition of the Zero movement – known in the Netherlands as Nul. She returned in 1965, and after that exhibition donated Aggregation to the museum. The Amsterdam museum is one of the places where Kusama’s European story began. Her radical language entered the context of the European avant-garde – it was not simply perceived as exotic art from Japan.

There is another utterly extraordinary episode – in November 1967, Kusama staged her famous “Naked Body Festival” in the chapel of Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. She was originally supposed to paint members of the National Ballet, but when the dancers failed to appear, Jan Schoonhoven – one of the key figures of the Dutch Nul group – volunteered instead. The artist covered his naked body with glowing red and green dots and lines. Her polka dots had, quite literally, become an instrument of body art – an artistic gesture in which the surface of the painting gave way to the human body.

Yayoi, like a small child, drew on everything. Any object could become a canvas for her art. Fashion was no exception. Clothing became an extension of her artistic practice – she effectively transferred her sculptures, polka dots and idea of self-obliteration directly onto the human body. In 1968, she founded the “Kusama Fashion Company”. According to her, the idea came after she spotted clothes in New York shop windows that resembled her own designs. She tracked down the manufacturer, showed him her ideas and eventually founded the company together with him.

Her clothes were radically provocative for their time – transparent dresses, garments with cut-outs in unexpected places, dresses with openings revealing the breasts or buttocks, polka-dot designs and, of course, the famous phallic forms.

At the same time, Kusama produced more conventional suits and dresses – and, by her own admission, these sold far better than the experimental designs. This abstract artist had a very real commercial instinct. Her 2023 collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which made her a megastar far beyond the art world, was therefore hardly accidental.

The curators of the exhibition took their cue from the artist herself with the series “My Eternal Soul”, which she began in 2009. They covered the museum walls without leaving gaps, much as Kusama covered her canvases with dots and strokes.

It becomes an enormous visual diary – Yayoi continued adding new paintings to the series almost every day. Bright colours and childlike, at first glance, imagery sit alongside remarkably serious themes – life, death, memory, love and infinity.

And this room feels particularly poignant today, after her death. Kusama continued working almost until the very end of her life.

The central installation of the 2026 retrospective is “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe” (2025), created specially for the Stedelijk.

Huge yellow forms, resembling tentacles or giant organic growths and covered in multicoloured polka dots, fill a mirrored space. Through the reflections, the forms multiply endlessly and the space loses its familiar boundaries. We lose our sense of self. The installation occupies an entire floor of the museum. Positioned at the heart of the exhibition route, it effectively brings together the artist’s key motifs – polka dots, repetition, mirrors, infinity and the disappearance of individual space.

I would recommend entering it at the very end of your journey through the world of the great Yayoi Kusama – and finally dissolving into her Universe.