A major Yayoi Kusama retrospective at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum has opened just weeks after the Japanese artist died at the age of 97. Originally planned as a major retrospective of her career, the exhibition has now become a posthumous tribute to one of the most recognizable artists of the contemporary era.
The exhibition opened to the public on September 11, 2026, and runs through January 17, 2027. At its center is an immersive Infinity Mirrored Room created around Kusama’s signature themes of repetition, infinity, reflection and polka dots.
A Planned Retrospective Became Something Else
When the Stedelijk Museum began preparing its major Yayoi Kusama exhibition, the intention was to celebrate the artist’s extraordinary career.
Then Kusama died.
The Japanese avant-garde artist died on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97. Her death came only weeks before the Amsterdam exhibition was due to open.
Instead of postponing or fundamentally changing the exhibition, the museum decided to present it as a tribute to her life and work.
Curator Leontine Coelewij told The Associated Press that after learning of Kusama’s death, the curatorial team decided to make the exhibition a tribute to the artist.
The timing has therefore given the exhibition a significance that could not have been anticipated when preparations began.
Visitors are now entering a retrospective that documents the career of an artist who has died, rather than seeing a celebration of a living artist’s continuing career.
Kusama’s Dots Welcome Visitors Before They Enter
The exhibition begins before visitors even enter the museum.
Kusama’s unmistakable dots have been applied to the Stedelijk Museum’s facade, while red fabric decorated with her patterns has been wrapped around trees on the adjacent Museum Square.
It is an unmistakable introduction to her visual world.
The polka dot became one of Kusama’s defining motifs, appearing across paintings, sculptures, installations and environments.
But the dots were not simply a decorative signature.
Kusama repeatedly connected her use of repetition and dots with hallucinations she experienced from childhood.
The Stedelijk exhibition therefore places the familiar visual language within the much more personal context of her artistic practice.
From Hallucinations to an Artistic Language
Kusama’s relationship with repetition was deeply connected to her experience of the world.
She described seeing dots, lights and patterns from a young age.
Rather than attempting to suppress these visions through conventional means, she transformed them into art.
The process became one of the central characteristics of her career.
Repeated dots could cover a canvas.
They could spread across a sculpture.
They could surround the viewer.
And, in her mirrored rooms, they could appear to continue infinitely.
The result was a visual language that transformed a deeply personal experience into something viewers around the world could enter and experience.
The Stedelijk exhibition highlights this development across decades of work.
The Infinity Mirror Room Takes Center Stage
One of the most important works in the Amsterdam exhibition is the Infinity Mirrored Room titled “The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe.”
The installation uses mirrors, colour and tentacle-like forms covered with rhythmic patterns of dots.
Standing inside the room changes the viewer’s relationship with the artwork.
Instead of looking at an object from outside, the visitor becomes physically surrounded by it.
Mirrors extend the visual space beyond the actual dimensions of the room.
The effect is disorienting and immersive.
It is also closely connected to one of Kusama’s central artistic ideas: infinity.
The room does not simply represent infinity.
It creates an experience in which the boundaries of the physical environment become difficult to perceive.
The Exhibition Takes Visitors Into Kusama’s Mind
For curator Leontine Coelewij, the mirrored room is one of the most important parts of the exhibition.
She described the installation as a way of stepping into Kusama’s mind.
That interpretation is particularly relevant now that the exhibition has become a memorial.
Kusama’s work has always contained a tension between beauty and psychological intensity.
Her installations can appear playful and spectacular.
Bright pumpkins, colourful dots and mirrored spaces have made her one of the most recognizable artists in contemporary culture.
But behind those instantly recognizable images is an artist who spent decades working with ideas of infinity, repetition, self-obliteration and hallucination.
The exhibition gives visitors an opportunity to see both sides.
A Giant Pumpkin Still Defines Her Visual World
Among the works displayed in Amsterdam is a large yellow pumpkin covered in black dots.
The pumpkin has become one of Kusama’s most recognizable motifs.
Her pumpkin sculptures combine a simple, familiar form with an obsessive visual pattern.
The result is simultaneously playful and strange.
The pumpkin appears friendly at first glance.
But its repeated dots and exaggerated scale transform it into something otherworldly.
That combination of accessibility and psychological depth helps explain why Kusama’s work has reached audiences far beyond the traditional contemporary art world.
Kusama and Amsterdam Have a Long History
The choice of Amsterdam for this exhibition is not accidental.
Kusama had a strong connection with the Netherlands, particularly during the experimental art scene of the 1960s.
She participated in a landmark 1965 exhibition connected with the ZERO movement at the Stedelijk Museum.
The movement had emerged in Europe around artists including Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and was interested in new approaches to light, space, movement and perception.
Kusama’s work fitted naturally into this experimental environment.
Her interest in repetition, infinity, environments and audience participation gave her a distinctive place within the international avant-garde.
Amsterdam also appealed to Kusama personally.
According to the exhibition’s curator, she felt comfortable with the city’s liberal and open atmosphere during the 1960s counterculture.
Kusama Was More Than Polka Dots
The extraordinary popularity of Kusama’s dots and Infinity Mirror Rooms can sometimes overshadow the breadth of her career.
Her work extends across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and other forms.
During her years in New York, she produced large-scale paintings, soft sculptures and happenings.
She also experimented with performance and public events.
Her work frequently challenged expectations about what art could be and where it could happen.
Some of her early performances deliberately blurred the boundary between artwork and public event.
This history is important because Kusama’s international fame today can make her appear to have emerged fully formed as the creator of mirrored rooms and dotted pumpkins.
Her career was much more experimental.
New York Changed Kusama’s Career
Kusama moved from Japan to New York in 1957.
The city became a crucial period in her artistic development.
She began producing her famous Infinity Net paintings and developed soft sculptures covered with repeated forms.
She became involved with the city’s avant-garde art scene and encountered artists who would later become major figures in postwar American art.
Her work challenged the dominant artistic language of the period.
She also struggled with the inequalities of the art world.
Recognition did not come easily.
Her position as a Japanese woman working in a predominantly male American art scene created additional barriers.
Yet she continued developing an artistic language that was increasingly difficult to categorize.
The Venice Biennale and Narcissus Garden
One of the most famous episodes in Kusama’s career came in 1966, when she presented Narcissus Garden outside the official exhibition structure of the Venice Biennale.
The installation consisted of hundreds of mirrored spheres.
The reflective surfaces transformed the surrounding environment and the people looking at them.
Kusama also attempted to sell the spheres individually to visitors.
The work became both an artistic intervention and a comment on the commercialization of art.
It demonstrated one of the qualities that would remain important throughout her career: Kusama understood that the relationship between artwork, audience and art market could itself become part of the artwork.
Returning to Japan
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973.
In 1977, she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she continued to live while maintaining her artistic practice.
Her studio was located nearby, allowing her to continue working.
This arrangement remained part of her life for decades.
Her decision to continue producing art despite her psychological difficulties became an important part of the story surrounding her career.
But the significance of her work should not be reduced to her mental health.
Kusama was a highly disciplined artist whose practice developed over decades through repeated experimentation with materials, space, perception and form.
Her personal experiences informed her art, but they do not fully explain it.
An Artist Who Turned Repetition Into Something Universal
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Kusama’s career is the way she transformed repetition into a universal visual language.
A dot is one of the simplest possible marks.
Kusama made it enormous.
She multiplied it.
She covered entire surfaces with it.
She placed it inside mirrored environments.
She used it to erase distinctions between objects and their surroundings.
The result is deceptively simple.
A visitor can immediately understand a Kusama installation visually.
But the ideas behind it are much more complex.
Infinity.
Repetition.
Identity.
Space.
Self-obliteration.
The relationship between the individual and the universe.
These ideas have allowed her work to remain relevant across generations.
The Final Exhibition Has a Different Emotional Weight
The Stedelijk retrospective would have been important even if Kusama were still alive.
But her death has inevitably changed how visitors encounter it.
A retrospective normally has the feeling of looking backward while anticipating what an artist might do next.
That possibility has now disappeared.
There will be no new Kusama exhibition created by Kusama herself.
No new series will emerge from her studio.
No future installation will extend the career documented in Amsterdam.
The Stedelijk exhibition therefore becomes a form of closure.
It presents decades of artistic experimentation at the moment when the artist’s own career has finally ended.
Kusama Wanted Her Art to Outlive Her
Kusama was aware of the relationship between her life and artistic legacy.
In an interview cited by AP, she spoke about continuing to fight for her art and expressed the hope that people would remain interested in her work after her death.
That makes the current exhibition particularly poignant.
The Amsterdam retrospective is now doing exactly that.
Visitors are continuing to engage with her work.
They are entering her installations.
They are looking at her paintings and sculptures.
They are encountering the visual language she developed over more than seven decades.
The artist is gone.
The work remains.
What the Amsterdam Exhibition Leaves Behind
The Stedelijk exhibition is not simply an exhibition of Kusama’s most famous images.
Its significance comes from bringing different periods of her career together.
The early experiments.
The New York years.
The performances.
The paintings.
The sculptures.
The installations.
And finally the immersive environments that made her one of the most recognizable contemporary artists in the world.
Seen together, they show that the dots were never the whole story.
They were part of a much larger investigation into perception and infinity.
A Final Encounter With Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama spent more than seven decades developing one of the most distinctive artistic languages of the modern era.
She transformed dots into environments.
She transformed mirrors into infinity.
She transformed personal visions into public experiences.
And she turned repetition into one of the most recognizable signatures in contemporary art.
Now, just weeks after her death, Amsterdam is presenting that journey to the public.
The Stedelijk Museum exhibition runs until January 17, 2027.
It was planned as a retrospective.
It has become something more.
It is now a final major encounter with an artist whose work continues to surround, reflect and challenge the people who enter it.
Yayoi Kusama is no longer creating new works.
But inside the Stedelijk Museum, her universe is still expanding.
Sources
- Associated Press – Stedelijk Museum opens Yayoi Kusama exhibition after her death
- Reuters – Yayoi Kusama dies at 97
- Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
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