Yayoi Kusama died at the age of 97 in a hospital in Tokyo, the same place where she had lived by her own choice for more than three decades.
She checked herself in in 1990. Not because of a passing crisis, but to stay. There, within those walls, she continued painting every day.
Since the age of ten, she had found her language: dots, nets, arches that repeated endlessly, as if she needed to fill every empty space so the world wouldn’t swallow her whole.
That obsession, the same one that led her to shut herself away, ended up traveling around the planet on its own. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, the first artist to do so. In 2022, one of her paintings sold for 10,5 million dollars.
Her company announced her death on August 26, although she had died twelve days earlier. The statement said something simple and enormous: she kept painting until the end, never putting down her brush.
She didn’t go out looking for the world. She stayed still, and the world was the one that lined up.