Remembering Yayoi Kusama: a life lived through art

Artist Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August 2026 in Tokyo, aged 97. The sad news reached us last week, and we've spent the days since thinking about the extraordinary body of work she leaves behind – and about how often her ideas have found their way into conversations here at Take Two.

An artist who kept making

Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, and started making art as a child. Over more than seven decades she moved between painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fashion, film, poetry, and fiction.

But certain ideas kept returning.

Dots. Nets. Pumpkins. Repetition. Accumulation. Infinity.

Kusama took one simple mark and repeated it until it became something else entirely – a canvas, an object, eventually a whole room. She called this process self-obliteration: using repetition to dissolve the line between herself and everything around her.

What moves us most is how long she kept at it. Across decades, across mediums, through enormous shifts in the art world and in her own life, she kept returning to the work. Her studio confirmed she was still painting shortly before she died.

Seeing her work together

At Christmas 2024, the Take Two team went to see the Kusama exhibition together at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

For a group of people who spend most of our working lives talking about artists, process, and materials, there was something different about stepping inside the work as a team.

You don't look at an Infinity Mirror Room from across a gallery. You walk into it. You're reflected in it. It changes as you move.

And then there's the scale – tiny repeated marks becoming enormous fields, ordinary shapes turned strange, mirrors making a small room feel like it could go on forever. It was playful. But under the playfulness sat a lifetime of serious thinking.

Image of Anna, Nicola, Angela, Jo and Tara at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melboure (more team members present not pictured!)

It wasn't our first brush with her work, either. In April 2023, Angela travelled to Naoshima, Japan's art island, with artist Donna Watson. She remembers being surrounded by colour, pattern, and Kusama's endless invention.

Video taken by Take Two Founder Angela Truscott at Naoshima, Japan's art island

What repetition can do

Kusama's name has come up in a number of our courses over the years, and it's not hard to see why.
So many of the artists we learn from at Take Two aren't chasing a finished image. They're committing to a process instead.

Make a mark. Repeat it. Notice what changes. Respond. Keep going.

For Kusama, repetition wasn't just a compositional choice. A single dot multiplied across a painting, a sculpture, a room, a body. Her Infinity Nets grew from thousands of small painted gestures. Mirrors sent forms further than a room could physically hold them. Pumpkins kept reappearing across decades of work.

It's a good reminder: a creative practice doesn't always need something new. Sometimes there's a whole world still waiting inside the thing you're already drawn to.

Image taken by Take Two Digital Marketing Manager Naomi C. at the NGV Exhibition

Following one idea for a lifetime

There's a pressure in creative practice to keep moving on – develop a new style, find a new subject, try another material, reinvent yourself.

Kusama's work offers a different way of thinking about it.

What if the shape, the colour, the material, the question that keeps turning up in your work isn't something to move past, but something worth following further?

Kusama followed the same ideas for almost her whole life. They changed as she changed – moving from paper to canvas, from canvas to sculpture, from sculpture into rooms large enough to walk through. Her practice shows how far a single idea can travel when an artist gives it enough attention, for long enough.

What she meant to us

Take Two's Course Creator Tara Axford has stood in front of Kusama's work twice – at the National Gallery of Victoria, and on Naoshima, where her pumpkin sits against the sea. "She'd long been the artist with the dots," Tara says. "For her, they stood for stars and particles, for space and time without an edge." Kusama put it simply herself:

"Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos."

Content Manager Nicola Rough remembers lying on the floor with Jo Wright and Sophie Edwards, gazing up at Kusama's bright yellow polka-dotted forms standing out against the backdrop of the NGV's famous stained-glass ceiling: “Time softened for a few minutes. We talk nearly every day online, but there was something so sweet about simply lying there together, completely absorbed in Yayoi’s world. Her work gave us that moment."

Account Manager Joanna Sheather likes to think Kusama understood something the rest of us don't quite grasp – that what got called hallucination was really a glimpse of atoms, time, and space, and that this is what turned her into the phenomenon she became.

Take Two's Creative Director Jo Wright remembers her first encounter with Kusama's immersive work, Gleaming Lights of the Souls, on a trip to Denmark.

A remarkable creative life

Kusama leaves behind an enormous body of work. But some of what she leaves us is harder to hang on a wall.

Permission to be obsessive. Permission to repeat yourself. Permission to make work that's strange, joyful, too much, entirely your own.

And permission to keep making, for as long as you're here to do it.

We feel lucky that her work found its way into ours – through our courses, through conversations, and through an afternoon spent walking through her exhibition together.

Her work will keep being encountered, discussed, and marvelled at by artists for a long time yet. The artist leaves. The work keeps travelling.

Here are some more images and memories from the Take Two team 🩷

Tom, Head of Acquisition shared: "One of my fave photos of Sofia and I came courtesy of Yayoi Kusama."

A sweet moment captured by Tara Axford.

Take Two's Founder Angela Truscott snapping a selfie at Naoshima.

Angela and Sophie pictured at the NGV exhibition