Timeline Friday 14 August 2026

Events on Friday 14 August 2026 2

• 1929 – 2026 Yayoi Kusama Japanese Artist Japanese contemporary artist whose immersive polka-dot installations, infinity mirror rooms and vibrant pumpkin sculptures made her one of the most celebrated and commercially successful artists in the world. Born into a seed-merchant family in Matsumoto, she began experiencing vivid hallucinations as a child — flashes of light, auras and dense fields of dots — and channelled these visions into an extraordinary body of work spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fiction and fashion. She lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo from 1977, walking to her nearby studio each morning to create. By the time of her death at 97, she was the world's top-selling living artist.
• 2026 Yayoi Kusama dies in Tokyo Died from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum confirmed she had continued to paint until her final days. Her representative David Zwirner announced her passing. She was, at the time of her death, the world's most commercially successful living artist and had been creating art for over seventy years.