TOKYO — Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose swirling polka dots, pumpkin sculptures and mirrored "infinity rooms" turned childhood hallucinations into one of the most commercially successful bodies of work in contemporary art, has died. She was 97.

Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, according to a statement from Yayoi Kusama Studio. The cause was multiple organ failure, Kyodo News reported. The David Zwirner gallery, which represented the artist, confirmed her death in a statement as well.

The studio said Kusama had continued working almost to the very end, describing an artist who never abandoned her craft even in her final days. "She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush," the studio said in its statement.

From rural Japan to the New York avant-garde

Kusama was born March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, a town in Nagano Prefecture, to parents who ran a plant nursery. She often described a difficult childhood marked by a physically abusive mother and a father who was frequently unfaithful. It was during those early years that Kusama began experiencing the vivid hallucinations that would shape her life's work — visions of dots and patterns spreading uncontrollably across her surroundings until, as she once put it, they consumed "the whole room, my whole body, and the whole universe."

She later described the act of surrendering to those visions as a kind of "self-obliteration," a concept........

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