Unseen works meet immersive showstoppers as Yayoi Kusama hits Switzerland

‘The phenomenon is that this almost 100-year-old woman who lives in near isolation, apart from a few people in her team and a few friends, manages to communicate through art across all boundaries to people of all ages, all backgrounds and those who are normally are not interested in art. That is really very, very rare,' says Sam Keller, director of Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, where a Yayoi Kusama retrospective runs until 25 January 2026.

On the show's preview day in October, co-hosted by one of the fondation’s key partners, Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille, light is bouncing around Kusama’s mirrored cube Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart, a 2025 installation positioned in the garden, while autumn leaves are reflected in the silver balls of Narcissus Garden that float around the lake at the Renzo Piano-designed gallery.

'It really is meditative watching the balls move across the pond,' says Keller of the work that was first shown guerrilla-style at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Back then, Kusama was a plucky underground star working in her adopted home of New York. It was not until 1993 that she represented Japan officially at the biennale: a milestone moment in a career and life that has made her one of the most recognised and oldest living artists in the world.

The Fondation Beyeler show is the first devoted to the artist in Switzerland and the team is expecting over half a million visitors who will marvel at the sheer range of her work, which spans from small delicate watercolours to a fully immersive installation featuring giant inflated black and yellow tentacles, entitled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019/2024). The dots and mirrors are delightfully discombobulating, like peering into an abyss. That sense of teetering, of reaching into the cosmos, is threaded throughout all Kusama’s unbelievably prolific output.

'I think people sense that there's a lot of integrity, authenticity in her quest. Life and art are not separate. It’s not an artist’s career, it's her life,' says Keller.

What gives this exhibition great energy is the inclusion of 130 previously unseen works in the 300-strong display. Curator Mouna Mekouar worked with the Kusama Foundation to find previously undervalued works such as etchings and a series of small luminescent watercolours featuring landscapes and flowers in bloom.

'When Kusama moved back to Japan in the early 1970s, she didn't have a lot of money and could not afford to buy good paper, so she would work with shikishi, a low-cost calligraphy paper. She did thousands of [such works], and we think it's really striking,' says Mekouar of the curation, which includes a pastel and ballpoint pen Self Portrait 1972 featuring butterflies and botanical motifs collaged into an inky black scape.

Elsewhere, you can track other recurring Kusama motifs, like the Infinity Net abstract works, which she began in New York and has continued throughout her life. Videos of her performance pieces in New York featuring her nude friends painting each other with dots are also on show alongside her fashion creations, such as a 1964 shift dress decorated with macaroni and sprayed gold. This is an artist who does not respect categories but who continually experiments in new mediums, including poetry, sculpture and fashion. Her ambition to cover the world in dots was taken to a new level with her Dots Infinity collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2012 and 2023. (Kusama also covered Wallpaper* in dots, as a guest editor in October 2023.)

On meeting Kusama at her studio in Tokyo in 2012, at the time of her retrospective at Tate Modern, it was clear this artist is obsessed with creating, and takes to her canvases every day. As Mekouar points out, she does not work from sketches or models; her way of creating is intuitive. 'Painting was a fever born of desperation, the only way for me to go on living in this world,' Kusama once said. Viewing this show, one appreciates her vast vision and her lifelong quest to capture the exhilarated act of creation.

Yayoi Kusama at Fondation Beyeler until 25 January 2026, fondationbeyeler.ch