Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has been making paintings, environments, and objects for over seven decades. Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama studied traditional Japanese painting as a young woman and moved to New York in the late 1950s. There, she would become part of New York’s burgeoning avant-garde in the 1960s, showing her works alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and many others, and staging radical (often nude) happenings that cast her as a counter-cultural heroine for a time.Though she was undoubtedly influenced by – and influential in – the New York art scene of the 60s, Kusama’s oeuvre is wholly unique. Rather than pulling from pre-existing artistic forms, Kusama’s work is a manifestation of the artist’s persistent hallucinations that began to color the world in an unusual way when she was just a child. The two definitive forms of Kusama’s career – the net-like design that colonized her earliest canvases, and the polka dots that pattern both room-sized environments and, often, the artist’s body – are said to replicate forms that monopolize her own sight. Kusama’s obsessive repetition of these patterns is a form of therapy for the artist; through her paintings, objects, and environments, Kusama projects her uncontrollable visions out onto the world.

In her 2012 painting Pumpkin, Kusama uses both the polka dots and the net pattern to create a vibrating, dimensional form in black and white. The figure of a surreal, swollen gourd takes center stage here, invoking a recurring character that appears in many of Kusama’s works from paintings to sculptures and room-filling installations. In her 1991 environment – a mirrored room (or infinity room, as her mesmerizing installations have come to be known) – Kusama uses strategically placed mirrors to create an unending field of gold and black. This immersive installation, which filled the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, was the first appearance of Kusama’s signature pumpkin, and like the many others that the artist has been creating since the 1960s, this mirrored environment envelopes viewers in the magical, graphic, impossible world of Kusama.

Since its first appearance in the 1990s, the pumpkin has been incorporated so frequently into Kusama’s work that its presence is often interpreted as self portraiture. For Kusama, repetition, obsession, infinity, and eternity are all fundamentally linked. By blanketing her world in dots and nets, often even clothing herself and her collaborators in the same patterns, Kusama is wrapped up into the endlessness of existence. Kusama’s artworks are more than decorative objects; they are manifestations of her unwavering vision, connecting the artist, and the viewer alike, in a web of infinite existence.