NETS-OBSESSION [OPR], 2003
Acrylic on canvas
194×259 cm (76.4×102 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2003 on the reverse

 

Provenance
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo
Private Collection, Tokyo
Sotheby’s, New York, 15 November 2006, Lot 225
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

 

Sotheby’s New-York: 17 May 2018
USD 2,535,000

Source: Sotheby’s
(#421) Yayoi Kusama (sothebys.com)

 

 

Expanding outward in an undulating lattice of loops and curls, Yayoi Kusama’s NETS-OBSESSION [OPR] is both meditative and ferocious. Initially conceptualized after the artist moved from Japan to Manhattan in the late 1950s, the artist’s series of Infinity Nets sprouted from a deep-seated ambition to establish herself in the New York art world. Resplendent with endlessly repeating strokes, the works in the series are a dual manifestation and coping mechanism for the artist’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and hallucinations brought on by a psychological condition.

Labored over in 2003, NETS-OBSESSION [OPR] continues the legacy of this iconic series, employing the same repetitive and hypnotic mark making that characterizes Kusama’s oeuvre, and functioning as a conceptual nexus of obsession and the unconscious, ultimately culminating in a canvas of peak visual and psychological intensity. In NETS-OBSESSION [OPR], Kusama’s restricted palette imparts a sense of ethereality onto the canvas; the work is vaporous, texturally anomalous and full of reflected light. The artist’s innumerable brushstrokes pile onto one another, culminating in some parts of the canvas in mounds of expressive impasto, and congealing into radiating planes of pigment in others. Each dab of paint is laid with a punctilious devotion to the act of mark making, consuming the canvas in a field of texture.