From March 14 to August 2, 2026, Museum Ludwig marks its fiftieth anniversary with a major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, tracing more than seventy years of her groundbreaking practice.

Bringing together over three hundred works, the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and literature, from an early drawing dating to around 1934 to a newly commissioned immersive installation. Kusama’s now-iconic vocabulary, polka dots, pumpkins, and Infinity Mirror Rooms, anchors a deeply personal exploration of infinity, repetition, and the dissolution of the self.

The show carries particular significance for the museum: Kusama’s Compulsion Furniture (1966) entered the founding collection in 1976, making this retrospective a full-circle moment. Expanding across the building, including the rooftop terrace, the exhibition features major installations such as Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963) and a newly conceived large-scale environment incorporating an Infinity Mirror Room.

Rooted in early experiences of hallucination and shaped by her move to New York in the late 1950s, where she staged radical, politically charged happenings, Kusama’s work merges autobiography with a universal vision of boundlessness and fragility. Since returning to Japan in 1973, this has evolved into a body of work that is at once introspective and overwhelmingly vibrant.

Organised in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Cologne presentation includes several large-scale works not shown elsewhere, reaffirming Kusama’s enduring ability to transform personal experience into immersive, collective encounters.

Image: Yayoi Kusama, Flowers That Speak All about My Heart Given to the Sky, 2018. Painted bronze. Collection of the artist, © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, Tobias Kreusler.