“My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe.” 
— Yayoi Kusama 

 

Painted in 2004, INFINITY-NETS (OPRT) is an exquisite example from Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s ground-breaking series of Infinity Nets. Veiled in a shimmering lattice of intricately applied loops, dots, and curls, the vibrant rose and pearl coloured canvas mesmerises with ethereal radiance that beckons us closer, enveloping the viewer in poetic splendour. The delicacies of the contours subtly unfold across the painting like billowing cotton-candy clouds, as Kusama melds the observable with the spiritual to obliterate the picture plane into boundlessness, perfectly epitomising the artist’s notion of the infinity.

 

A Dot in the Universe

 

 

For her all-over abstraction of colour and texture that teases our sense of spatial depth, as masterfully showcased in the ebbs and flows of the present painting’s netted formation, a comparison can be made to the layered Abstraktes Bilder works of Gerhard Richter (see for example, Lot 16 - Gerhard Richter, Kerzenschein (Candle-light) (1984)) . Both artists bring the technique of painting to the forefront of the composition, following their own distinctive method of mark-making. But whereas Richter plays with the notions of intent versus accident, minimising the role of the artist’s hand through his squeegee tool that gives form to chance, Kusama’s repetitive approach of arching nets and polka-dots is meticulously precise.

 

Having always insisted that the process of creation is integral to the significance of the works, Kusama employs the minimal gesture of a single touch of the brush to cover her Infinity Net canvases in their entirety. Working fixedly for up to 50 or 60 hours at a time, she lays down her loops one-by-one with the canvas placed flat on a table-top or other surface. As such, it is impossible for her to see the whole of the painting while she is working, thereby elevating the importance of her mark-making as she is denied of the ability to respond to or alter the composition as it comes into its complete form.

 

 

 

Contrasting the expansive and passionate gestures of the Abstract Expressionists (see for example, Lee Krasner, Another Storm (1963)), the labour-intensive monotony of obsessive, small strokes in Kusama’s Infinity Nets can be considered almost machine-like in execution. And yet, there is a resoundingly emotive power evoked by the intimacy of her scalloped curves that spread across the canvas in seemingly infinite rippling arcs, arising from Kusama’s ultimate desire to subsume individual ego and become one with the universe through what she coins ‘self-obliteration.’

 

Kusama and the Infinite

 

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, Kusama’s crucial years of early adolescence were plagued by hallucinations the artist began experiencing at the age of 10 of fields of dots that would engulf everything around her, including herself. To cope with her fears, the artist sought therapeutic relief in painting her early ink works ‘of tiny dots and pen drawings of endless and unbroken chains of graded cellular forms or peculiar structures that resembled magnified sections of plant stalks’ ⁱ. These formative mediations on infinity set the groundwork for what would become the core of Kusama’s artistry and person – a unique aesthetic framework that is both recognised and celebrated around the world.

 

In June 1958, Kusama left for New York, seeking to escape her troubled family life and with the aspiration to ‘grab everything that went on in the city and become a star’ ⁱⁱ. She debuted her inaugural Infinity Net canvases just 18 months later, at the Brata Gallery during her first solo exhibition in the city which was an immediate success, garnering wide critical acclaim including that of Donald Judd who both purchased a work and published a raving review.

 

 

 

 

Celebrated for challenging the muscularity of the New School painters who were dominating the city’s art scene at the time, Judd later reflected on Kusama’s innovative work: ‘If you compare it to almost anybody at that point, it’s newer and more original. You could strike out with Pollock, Newman, Rothko, etc., Reinhardt. The only person you could kind of find that might be a little bit close was, for a brief time, Frank Stella. But, actually, I think she’s somewhat more original than Frank. And clearly she has more durability than Frank’ ⁱⁱⁱ.

 

“I put my whole life on dots and wanted to rebel against history.” 
— Yayoi Kusama

 

 

 

Created almost half a century after she began her renowned Infinity Nets body of works, INFINITY-NETS (OPRT) exemplifies Kusama’s matured approach. Differing to her early oil paint iterations, the present work is rendered in glimmering sapphire-pink and white acrylic paint on canvas – owing to a pivotal shift of medium the artist undertook in the early 1980s. Whilst this transition nods to Kusama’s early nihonga water-based experimentations, the quicker drying time of acrylic reflects the artist’s relentless endurance to make sense of the world and herself, through her art, with remarkable ferocity. As esteemed critic Roberta Smith praises of these later paintings, ‘they have an automatic yet meditative quality and the unconscious physical energy of handwriting, attesting not just to the specialness of touch but to its inevitability.’ ^iv

 

 

 

 

 

Though Kusama’s compulsive need to self-obliterate through ritualistic replication is not unique to her Infinity Nets, instead forming the backbone of her entire multidisciplinary oeuvre (see for example, Lot 19 – Yayoi Kusama, Repetition (1999)), her Net paintings are singular in that they openly display the process of their making. From detail to detail, our gaze both pauses and whirls around INFINITY-NETS (OPRT) endlessly, as foreground and background interweave to an almost dizzying effect. Though constrained by the borders of the canvas, the majestically vibrant net feels to expand beyond its frame, wall, and into the room, immersing the viewer as we too, fall into Kusama’s cosmic universe.

 

“With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe.” 
— Yayoi Kusama 

Collector’s Digest

 

Universally recognised as one of the most important artists of our time, Kusama’s work forms part of extensive museum collections throughout the world. This includes the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

 

Having been honoured with extensive solo exhibitions throughout her career, including the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, Kusama continues to affirm her position as a leading contemporary artist. She has recently presented a retrospective at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (23 April – 15 August 2021), and an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden (10 April – 31 October 2021).

 

Kusama currently has a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London (18 May 2021 – 12 June 2022), and the Rubell Museum in Miami (18 November 2020 – 12 December 2021). An upcoming show is also being planned at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (postponed from 2020, new dates to be announced).

 

 

ⁱ Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2016, n.p.

ⁱⁱ Yayoi Kusama quoted in Akira Tatehata, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 11

ⁱⁱⁱ Donald Judd, quoted in Andy Battaglia, ‘Kusama’s Art, Friendship, and Predilection for Cat Milk’, ARTnews, 16 November 2017, online

^iv Roberta Smith, ‘Yayoi Kusama and the Amazing Polka-Dotted, Selfie-Made Journey to Greatness’, The New York Times, 3 November 2017, online