Yayoi Kusama's Last Tour
When the doors opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen on 12 October 2025, nobody called it a farewell. The show was billed as a homecoming of sorts, the first time a Swiss museum had given Yayoi Kusama a full retrospective, and the mood was celebratory. Over three hundred works drawn from across Europe and Asia, seven decades, more than a hundred and thirty pieces that had never been shown in Europe. Kusama was 96 and still painting. The tour ahead of her ran to Cologne and then Amsterdam, into 2027.
She died on 14 August 2026, at a hospital in Tokyo, aged 97. Her studio held the news for nearly two weeks and announced it on 27 August. By then the Basel and Cologne legs had already closed. What was planned as a victory lap is now the last thing she toured.
Basel
The show was assembled by Mouna Mekouar, Leontine Coelewij and Stephan Diederich, working, in the official phrasing, “in close collaboration with the artist and her studio.” That matters, because it means the shape of the exhibition reflects how she wanted to be read at the end of her life: not as the Infinity Room artist, but as someone who had been working continuously since the early 1950s and never really stopped.
So the early work carried real weight, including rarely seen paintings and watercolours made in her hometown of Matsumoto before she ever left Japan. Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization), painted in 1950 in oil and enamel on a seed sack, is not a polka-dot crowd-pleaser. It is a young woman in postwar Japan painting her way out of something. No. N2 from 1961 belongs to the Infinity Net paintings she began after moving to New York and returned to for the rest of her life.
Then the rest of it: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show from 1963, her first installation, a rowboat swallowed by soft white protrusions. Compulsion Furniture from 1966, which belongs to the Museum Ludwig and has lived in Cologne for decades. Narcissus Garden, the 1966 Venice Biennale intervention where she laid out fifteen hundred mirror balls on the grass outside the Italian Pavilion and sold them to passers-by for two dollars each until officials shut her down. They told her, she recalled, that it was inappropriate to sell artworks “as if they were hot dogs or ice cream cones.”
Basel gave her a new Infinity Mirrored Room, made in 2025 and titled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe. It became the most visited exhibition by a contemporary artist in the Fondation Beyeler’s history.
Cologne
The Museum Ludwig took the show from 14 March to 2 August 2026, and more than 480,000 people went. For a single-artist retrospective in a city of about a million, that is a remarkable number, and it says something about the particular reach Kusama had. She was a serious artist with a genuinely popular audience, a combination almost nobody manages.
Cologne remade I’m Here, but Nothing, first shown in 2000: an ordinary domestic interior, sofa, table, lamps, dressed in fluorescent dots and lit with ultraviolet until the room dissolves. Out on the museum’s roof terrace it put a group of her painted bronze flowers, Flowers That Speak All about My Heart Given to the Sky, three of them on timber platforms with the black spires of Cologne Cathedral rising directly behind.
The Cologne run closed on 2 August. Kusama died twelve days later.
Amsterdam
The Stedelijk opens on 11 September and runs to 17 January 2027, with Leontine Coelewij, one of the tour’s three curators, handling it. The museum has been direct about what changed. The show, it said this week, “has now become a posthumous tribute celebrating the life and work of the artist.”
The checklist is largely intact. Both 2025 Infinity Mirrored Rooms travel, The Hope of the Polka Dots and Illusion Inside the Heart. So do Narcissus Garden, the One Thousand Boats Show, the flowers, a 1991 Pumpkin on canvas and I Saw the Morning Sun from 2017. What changes is the tense. A retrospective built with a living artist becomes, on 11 September, a memorial she helped design.
There is a version of this that feels grim. It mostly does not. Kusama spent her career insisting that the individual dissolves into something larger, that the dots go on after you stop, and that this is a consolation rather than a threat. An exhibition that outlives her is the most on-message thing that could have happened to it.
The Fondation Beyeler ended its notice with two words she used often enough that they read as a signature. Love forever.
Yayoi Kusama is at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027, organised by the Fondation Beyeler with the Museum Ludwig and the Stedelijk Museum.
