When Yayoi Kusama launches a major exhibition, it rarely feels like a mere presentation of artworks; it feels like a planetary alignment. The opening of her new European tour at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen marks such a moment — a convergence of decades of artistic experimentation, cultural influence, and personal mythology. For the first time in Swiss history, a museum has dedicated a full-scale retrospective to the iconic Japanese artist, gathering more than 300 works from eight countries.

The scale alone is breathtaking, but what makes this exhibition exceptional is its emotional range. Stretching from Kusama’s earliest, almost fragile ink drawings to monumental new installations created specifically for this event, the retrospective reads like a living biography. It traces the evolution of an artist who transformed her private obsessions — repetition, infinity, reflection, annihilation, ecstatic accumulation — into a universal language.

Mapping Seven Decades of Radical Reinvention

Few contemporary artists have reinvented themselves as relentlessly as Kusama. Over seventy years, she has refused every attempt at categorization, moving fluidly between painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature, fashion, and film. Fondation Beyeler foregrounds this restless inventiveness, structuring the exhibition around pivotal breakthroughs rather than chronological chapters.

Visitors encounter the hypnotic Infinity Nets, painted with a precision that borders on spiritual discipline. These undulating fields of tiny white arcs — at once obsessive and meditative — were the works that first stunned the New York avant-garde in the late 1950s.

Near them, Kusama’s Accumulation Sculptures rise like soft monuments to compulsive making: everyday objects smothered in bulbous protuberances, turning domesticity into surreal terrain. They remain some of the most unsettling works of the post-war era, merging sexuality, psychology, and absurdity in equal measure.

The exhibition then expands outward — literally — into immersive spatial environments. Narcissus Garden (1966/2025), that shimmering sea of metallic spheres originally performed guerrilla-style in Venice, returns as a dialogue between self-reflection and spectacle. And, of course, the show includes the highly anticipated Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart (2025), alongside a new bespoke Infinity Room engineered specifically for Beyeler’s architectural setting.

A Retrospective Built for Emotional Encounter

Kusama’s mirror rooms have become global cultural phenomena, often photographed more than they are contemplated. Yet within Beyeler’s quiet, disciplined curation, these environments regain their psychological charge. Stepping inside, viewers experience what Kusama has sought her entire life: dissolution into pattern, surrender to repetition, immersion in cosmic scale.

Her work has always been autobiographical, but it is never limited by autobiography. Childhood hallucinations, lifelong struggles with mental health, and her voluntary residence in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital all infuse her practice — not as pathology, but as philosophy. Kusama transforms personal vulnerability into a shared meditation on time, selfhood, and the infinite.

The museum’s statement describes the exhibition as a “multilayered encounter,” and this proves accurate: each room becomes a different facet of Kusama’s universe. One gallery feels hallucinatory, another tender, another quietly ecstatic.

Together they reveal an artist who has expanded the boundaries of contemporary art while simultaneously stripping it down to its most primal questions:

What does it mean to see? To repeat? To dissolve? To exist inside the endless?

– Together they reveal an artist who has expanded the boundaries of contemporary art while simultaneously stripping it down to its most primal questions.

New Works, New Worlds

Among the exhibition’s most anticipated elements are the 130 works never before seen in Europe — an extraordinary number for an artist whose global circulation is already vast. These pieces serve as a reminder that Kusama, now in her mid-90s, remains fiercely productive. Her new installations continue to push her motifs toward unexpected territories: denser reflections, bolder geometries, more disorienting spatial illusions.

The bespoke Infinity Room crafted for Beyeler is particularly revelatory. It recasts the familiar Kusama experience as something slower and more enveloping, emphasizing the poetic over the spectacular. Rather than chasing sensation, it invites contemplation.

A Mirror Held Up to the Present

Part of Kusama’s enduring relevance lies in how uncannily her themes resonate with the contemporary moment. Repetition, anxious self-proliferation, the dissolving edges of identity — these are not just motifs of her art; they are the conditions of digital life. Her work feels prophetic, a luminous mirror held up to a world overwhelmed by images, reflections, and infinite scroll.

Yet beneath the spectacle lies something deeply human. Kusama’s practice, at its core, is a long, unbroken attempt to reconcile fear and wonder. Her dots, nets, and mirrors are acts of devotion: gestures toward making the incomprehensible visible.

A Journey into the Infinite

Fondation Beyeler has not simply gathered artworks; it has constructed an emotional landscape — one that captures the vastness of Kusama’s imagination and the vulnerability that fuels it. Visitors leave with the sense that they have not merely observed an exhibition but traveled through the inner architecture of an artistic mind unlike any other.

The Yayoi Kusama retrospective is on view at Fondation Beyeler until January 25, 2026. For those who enter, the experience is not just visual. It is existential: a momentary invitation to step inside the infinite and feel it looking back.