Yayoi Kusama // Eternal Soul

Message from Hades, 2014

Acrylic on canvas, 194 × 194 cm (76⅜ × 76⅜ in.)

© Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only.

Launched in 2009, Yayoi Kusama’s My Eternal Soul series stands as one of the most ambitious and prolific undertakings of her career. Comprising hundreds of large-scale acrylic paintings, the series brings together vivid colour, biomorphic shapes, and surreal faces in compositions that feel at once playful and unsettling.

These works reveal the full force of Kusama’s late style, where her lifelong obsessions with repetition, infinity, and psychological depth are distilled into a bold and highly expressive visual language. Created well into her eighties, My Eternal Soul not only testifies to Kusama’s relentless discipline but also offers a profound meditation on life, death, and the persistence of the human spirit.
Yayoi Kusama Exhibition, 26 January 2022. Image © Lizzy Shaanan, Pikiwiki Israel, licensed under CC BY 2.5.
"I want to fight despair with hope, and to spread the message of love through the paintings I continue to create every day."

— Yayoi Kusama

Works such as Message from Hades (2014), shown in Kusama’s 2015 David Zwirner exhibition Give Me Love, highlight her pairing of vivid colour with themes of mortality and inner struggle. The recurring “eye” motif, along with flowers, faces, and self-portraits, anchors My Eternal Soul, while critics note how the series reimagines her earlier nets and cellular forms in bold, large-scale compositions.

The diverse titles, from Fear of Death (2008) to All of My Love for Humanity (2019) , reflect Kusama’s meditations on mortality, resilience, connection, and humanity. Exhibited internationally at Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and major museums, the series marks a defining achievement of her late career and a landmark of her global legacy.
Exhibtions and Performance Art
Landmark Exhibitions and Performances ©Lizzy Shaanan Pikiwiki Israel, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons