Yayoi Kusama

From childhood she saw hallucinations in which the dots covering an object spread onto her own body. Painting was a way of getting them outside her and under control. She took the dots past the canvas until they covered whole rooms, then set mirrors facing each other to make the repetition endless. Step into an Infinity Mirror Room and your own body joins the repetition. Obsession used as structure rather than subject. She moved to New York in the late 1950s, staged happenings and anti-war protests, and returned to Japan in 1973. She then checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and worked there for close to fifty years. She died in 2026.