Exceptional Works: Yayoi Kusama

Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has been integral in shaping the landscape of international contemporary art and is widely acclaimed as one of the most successful artists in the world. Unmistakable and endlessly inventive, her groundbreaking body of work—which comprises painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and installation—traverses a range of postwar artistic movements while consistently engaging such universal themes as subjectivity, life, death, infinity, and obsession.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2026, INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM - LET'S SURVIVE FOREVER (2017) is a striking example of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. These unique spatial environments use repetition as a means to convey a poetic experience of endlessness.

INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM - LET'S SURVIVE FOREVER envelops the visitor inside a large mirrored room with stainless steel balls suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor; an enclosed column within the room offers yet another mirrored environment visible through peepholes. A sense of infinity is offered through the play of reflections between the circular shapes and the surrounding mirrors.

As the art critic Sian Cain writes, “Kusama’s kaleidoscopic ‘infinity rooms’ [are] mirror-lined spaces that use reflections of light to evoke a dizzying sense of the cosmic. These are perhaps what she is now most famous for.”

These environments embody the main principles of Kusama's long-running practice. While Infinity Mirror Rooms have appeared in her work since the 1960s, they gained increasing centrality in the mid-2000s and have drawn record-breaking attendances to shows that include such installations. The multiple mirrors invite glimpses into parallel worlds, just as the artist's Infinity Nets can be seen to push painting to its spatial extents. Likewise, the repetitive light cycles echo the history of obsession within her work, which derives from her desire for art that is at once autobiographical and seemingly created outside of the confines of the self.