INTERMINABLE NET #3, 1959
Oil on canvas
133.4×124.5 (52.5×49 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 1959 on the reverse

Provenance
JFK University Collection, Orinda, California
Acquired by the present owner in 1990

Sotheby’s New-York: 12 May 2015
USD 5,850,000

The years between 1958 and 1962 were a brief but intense period of production for the painter, whose Infinity Nets gained her serious critical recognition across America and Europe. Kusama arrived in the city carrying approximately 2000 small works on paper she produced in Japan, including watercolors and ink drawings whose Surrealist abstractions are reminiscent of French Tachisme and European Modernism.  While examples from this body of work reveal the formal genesis of her interest in dots, it was not until she moved that she began her most sustained and concentrated effort toward what she referred to as ‘self-obliteration.’ Working from a studio at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street in Lower Manhattan, Kusama initiated the series by repeating one single, simple gesture endlessly across the surface of the canvas. With minute flicks of the wrist, Kusama impressed a map of arcs and swirls, recording the repetition of her brush in a complex skein of ethereal scalloped loops. Interminable Net #3 illuminates the insistently handmade nature of Kusama’s painting: while appearing upon first impression as a systematic network of gridlike perfection, close inspection reveals an irregular depth of brushstrokes that meet, spread, and overlap. The slipping, roaming, and misalignment of Kusama’s celestial moons evade a strict pattern of mechanical reproduction and celebrate subtle imperfections that divulge the concurrently obsessive and meditative nature of the artist’s stamina and dedication. Optically humming before our eyes, the expanse of Interminable Net #3 creates an oscillating sensation that is at once pensive and electrifying.