In pictures: The dotty world of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama

News imageBBC Yayoi Kusama seen looking through a clear screen with red spots painted on it, with red and white clothes and backgroundBBC

Using bright colours, shapes, patterns and reflections, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has died at the age of 97, was known for creating extraordinary immersive worlds that delighted millions of people around the globe.

News imageGetty Images A gallery visitor standing in a mirrored room containing lots of brightly coloured circles and their reflectionsGetty Images

Kusama emerged as part of the pop art movement - and was among a select group of artists whose work became truly popular with a mass audience, attracting crowds to exhibitions from Tokyo to New York and London.

News imageGetty Images A Kusama installation - a dark space with many small coloured dots in the air, and reflections of light doorways with silhouetted figuresGetty Images

Her trademark polka dots covered entire galleries and giant sculptures, and she also used mirrors and lights to create the effect of shapes and patterns disappearing into infinity.

Actress Julia Fox (below) was among those at the opening of her exhibition in Melbourne, Australia in 2024.

News imageGetty Images Julia Fox in an elaborate white dress looking at the camera and reflected in mirrors in a room with red walls and giant round sculptures covered in white spotsGetty Images

Kusama said she saw hallucinations of dots and lights as a child, and used those visions in her art from the 1960s.

News imageGetty Images Black & white photo of Yayoi Kusama in 1967 painting a young woman wearing a bikini at a Body Festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts.Getty Images

Kusama made a major global breakthrough after representing Japan at the Venice Biennale in the 1990s.

News imageGetty Images Yayoi Kusama in 2001 seated on the floor of one of her installation rooms, surrounded by hundreds of small coloured lights and mirrorsGetty Images

She is pictured inside one of her Infinity Mirror Rooms in Paris in 2001 above, and with fellow Japanese artist Yoko Ono in Sydney in 2000 below.

News imageGetty Images Yoko Ono leaning and speaking to Yayoi Kusama in 2000Getty Images

She had exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

News imageGetty Images A red and white patterned artwork filling the photo with a woman looking at it at the edgeGetty Images

Visitors themselves applied more than 800,000 polka dot stickers to a white room (and their own faces) at the Smithsonian Institute's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2017.

News imageGetty Images A gallery visitor poses in front of a wall covered in multi-coloured spots on the final day of the Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute's Hirshhorn Museum on Sunday, May 14, 2017Getty Images

Kusama's 2012 retrospective at the Tate Modern was followed by an installation of her Infinity Mirror Rooms at the same venue from 2021, which drew huge audiences and was extended several times.

News imageGetty Images A Kusama installation including numerous round mirrors showing the face of the same young woman, at Tate Modern in London in 2014Getty Images

In 2023, a giant figure of Kusama was installed to tower over Louis Vuitton's flagship store on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

News imageReuters Exterior of Louis Vuitton store with logo and a giant artificial figure of Yayoi Kusama leaning over the roof and apparently attaching multi-coloured polka dots to the buildingReuters

Her giant figures, shapes and animals filled Manchester's Aviva Studios when the venue opened in 2023.

News imageReuters A series of large colourful polka dot sculptures in a dark gallery including a cat, a girl and ballsReuters
News imageGiant luminous pink tentacle-like sculptures covered in black spots in a dark gallery, with visitors dwarfed by their scale

From Manchester to Melbourne - her spots were also a hit in the Australian city two years ago.

News imageGetty Images A blurred gallery visitor in front of a white wall and sculpture covered in multi-coloured spotsGetty Images

She had voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades, and died in a Tokyo hospital earlier this month.

News imageGetty Images Kusama in a wheelchair with red hair and black and yellow spotty clothes, in front of large multi-coloured paintingsGetty Images