Nets Infinity, 1998
Acrylic with gold pigment and metallic paint on canvas
117×91 cm (46.1×35.8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 1998 Nets Infinity’ (on the reverse)

 

Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm
Private Collection, Sweden
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 26 May 2018
USD 1,695,304

Source: Christie’s
YAYOI KUSAMA (JAPAN, B. 1929) (christies.com)

 

An intricate web of thick, gold pigmented acrylic unfurls atop a glistening metallic gold background in Yayoi Kusama’s hypnotic painting Nets Infinity. Reminiscent of a blazing sun, the elaborate pattern saturates the entire surface of the work, imbuing it with a sense of form and motion that seems to swell and recede across the canvas like a hallucinatory vision.

Executed in 1998, the work was created in the same year of Kusama’s landmark retrospective Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1969, which toured the USA and Japan. Exhibited at the likes of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the show received great critical acclaim worldwide.  Nets Infinity is a vivid and fantastical example of the artist’s career-defining ‘infinity net’ paintings. With no definitive beginning or end, these iconic works read as dizzying journeys into the infinite. Indeed, despite its ostensibly flat façade, the present work seems almost alive, ebbing and flowing like the endless ocean tide. Kusama has achieved her signature polka-dot motif in this work through a dense accumulation of impasto paint. Painstakingly applied, this rhythmic lattice is offset against the brilliant burnished gold of the canvas beneath, creating a potent alchemy at once weighty and light, airy and congested.