‘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. I was standing at the centre of obsession’ (Yayoi Kusama in conversation with Gordon Brown in ed. Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103).
The sheer grandeur of Yayoi Kusama’s canvas is overwhelming. The scale of the work combined with its intricate detail has an arresting impact, implicating the viewer both physically and psychologically. From a distance the painting initially appears to be monochromatic but upon closer examination sumptuous interweaving tones of deep red and gold emerge. Kusama has explored the limits of these colours throughout her career, creating sumptuous fiery landscapes which provoke our perception and challenge the underpinnings of abstraction and craftwork. The all-encompassing pattern of iconic polka dots which covers the surface of Infinity Nets is formed by a reverse process, in which the artist paints swirling nets over a base colour, in this case a shimmering gold. Kusama’s unique technique establishes layers of textural complexity, adding depth and intricacy reminiscent of regal finery and lace. This attention to detail combined with the artist’s monumental vision serves to simultaneously evoke infinite cosmologies and the minutiae of individual cells. Kusama embraces the paradoxical elements inherent in her paintings and sees both herself and the universe within them: ‘I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among billions’ (Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2011 p.23).
The Infinity Nets are the pre-eminent series of the artist’s life and career. Kusama presented a group of white Infinity Nets at her first solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York in 1958, and has compulsively returned to them for over half a century since. They are an emblematic and deeply personal set of arts, configured as a symptom of Kusama’s neurosis and the hallucinatory visions she suffered growing up in wartime Japan. The artist highlights the paramount importance of the process of painting, describing the obsessive manner in which she creates her ever-expanding nets across huge canvases, sculptures and even bodies, paying no attention to the outside world. ‘Day after day I forgot my coldness and hunger by painting’ (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in ‘Kusama Dot Com’, New York Times Style Magazine, 24 February 2008).
Infinity Nets is therefore able to render the incomprehensible imaginable, offering a direct window into the artist’s psyche. Executed in 2004, it stands as an archetypal example of Kusama’s oeuvre-defining series and enables us to examine the development of her signature style.