Kusama Yayoi

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan. From a young age, she experienced vivid hallucinations — fields of dots, flowers speaking to her, patterns consuming her surroundings — and she turned to art as a means of self-therapy and psychological release. After studying traditional Japanese painting (Nihonga) at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, she moved to the United States in 1957, settling in New York City, where she became a central figure in the avant-garde scene, befriending artists such as Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol. Her early American work included her iconic Infinity Net paintings — vast, monochromatic canvases covered in obsessive, looping brushstrokes — which anticipated both Minimalism and the broader conceptual art movements of the 1960s.