2 min readAug 28, 2026 07:10 AM IST First published on: Aug 28, 2026 at 07:10 AM ISTIt began with a red flower, a print on a tablecloth in her childhood home in Matsumoto, Japan. As 10-year-old Yayoi Kusama watched, the pattern spread across the room, covering the floor, ceiling, all the furniture, even her body. Similar hallucinations would plague the artist for the rest of her life, an affliction she could only cope with by making art out of it.Over the course of her seven-decade career, Kusama turned the obsessions of her singular mind into works so distinctive that by the time of her death earlier this month she had cemented her place in the popular imagination as an icon of contemporary art. The spectacular nature of Kusama’s works could sometimes overshadow the grit and ambition that defined her trajectory: She let nothing stop her, not her mental-health struggles, not the expectations of her traditional, abusive family, whom she fled in her late 20s, and certainly not the sexism of the male-dominated world of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism in post-war US.AdvertisementThe polka-dotted pumpkins, “tentacles”, and mirrored “infinity rooms” that defined Kusama’s work did more than reflect her visions. The immersive installations she was best known for, are a rebuke to solipsism, their rhythmic repetition of patterns an invitation to inhabit and understand the reality of another mind. That in the Instagram age these works are often treated as just another backdrop for selfies adds, perhaps, to the sense of irony that let Kusama give colourful form to her darkest thoughts.