Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, Japan, 1929 – Tokyo, Japan, 2026) spent seven decades developing polka dots, net patterns, and mirrored infinity into a single sustained idea she called self-obliteration: the dissolution of the boundary between a single body and its surroundings, achieved through repetition dense enough to erase the edges of both.

Kusama traced the idea to a childhood hallucination in provincial Japan, in which a field of red flowers on a tablecloth appeared to spread across the ceiling, the walls, and her own body until she felt she was dissolving into the pattern. In 1955, still an unknown painter, she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe for guidance; O'Keeffe wrote back and helped introduce her to New York gallerists, and in 1957 Kusama left Japan for the United States. There, working in marathon sessions, she developed her monochromatic Infinity Net paintings, dense fields of small looping brushstrokes that read, from a distance, as a single undifferentiated surface, a deliberate rebuff to the individual gesture prized by de Kooning and Pollock, and became a fixture of the downtown scene, sharing an apartment with Donald Judd.