Every image we make of ourselves seems to add something. One more selfie, one more profile, one more clip: a little more presence, a little more of us in the world. The assumption is so ordinary that it is difficult to see as an assumption at all – that a thing repeated becomes more itself.

Yayoi Kusama, whose death at 97 was announced in late August, spent six decades testing that proposition, though she was not thinking about us when she began.

She was one of the most recognizable artists in the world, and her exhibitions drew extraordinary crowds from New York to Tokyo. In Israel, her 2021–22 retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art drew some 670,000 visitors, the most the museum had ever recorded for a single exhibition. One of the works she created for that exhibition went on long-term display at the museum in June 2025 and can be seen there today.

Kusama’s own subject was more elementary than repetition. She returned again and again to an assumption we rarely notice: that things are separate from the environments in which they appear. Her work did not simply reject that distinction. It tested how many different ways it could be made unstable.

Much of what made her instantly recognizable grew from experiences far less playful than the work can appear. From childhood, she recounted hallucinations in which patterns spread beyond the objects on which she first saw them, across rooms and surfaces and eventually across her own body, an experience she described in terms of self-obliteration.

Consider The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens (2015). At the center of a yellow room covered in black........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)