YAYOI KUSAMA (1929 – )
Nets – Infinity, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
161.9 x 161.9 cm (63 3/4 x 63 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2004 (on the reverse)
Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in 2004 by the present owner
Auction History
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 11 November 2024
Estimated: HKD 11,000,000 – 14,000,000
HKD 10,080,000 / USD 1,296,410
Spectacular for its rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops, Nets – Infinity created in 2004 is a testament to Yayoi Kusama’s most celebrated corpus of paintings. Captivating in its level of detail and the artist’s mastery of spatial abstraction, the present work consists of an endless maze of oscillating, kaleidoscopic lines which weave atop a vast black background.
Rendered in a rare appearance of subtle metallic white, these patterns fill up our entire field of vision, the apparent uniformity of the over-a-meter net belies minute differences in the size of the individual brush strokes and the quantity of paint utilized in every stroke. Against the impenetrable depths of the black underpainting, Kusama’s labyrinthine web of tightly woven white lines and dots which shift and pulsate with a purple hue, mimic the expanding fields of color and pattern that inspire Kusama’s practice. Created almost 50 years after she began this expansive series, Nets- Infinity closely corresponds with the artist’s very first examples owing to its intricate patterning of undulating forms that mimic the movements of the ocean. Appearing at auction for the first time, Nets- Infinity exemplifies the exquisite beauty and mesmerizing complexity which characterizes the very best of the artist’s oeuvre.
Distinguished in its alluding to the origins of the iconic series, the present work has aesthetic resonance with Kusama’s earliest Infinity Nets. Remarking upon the basis for this, her most acclaimed series, Kusama has revealed that these works find their origin in an earlier series of watercolors titled Pacific Ocean. Painted in 1958-1960, the suite of smaller works was inspired by the infinite expanse of “shallow space” contained within the tiny wavelets of the Pacific Ocean, which Kusama glimpsed through her aeroplane window as she arrived in the United States. The mesmerizing patterns of the present work which shift in shades of purple and white calls to mind the terrifying glimpse of infinity one experiences before a seemingly endless expanse of water. Indeed, standing before the present work, surrounded by the interminable expanse of minute marks, one is absorbed by the elegantly rippling undulations of Kusama’s trademark dots; a sea of infinitely crashing waves.
Continuing the legacy of Kusama’s most iconic series that the artist first exhibited in New York in 1959, Nets- Infinity employs the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that has stood as the most enduring iteration of her indelible aesthetic. Full of reflected light and the artist’s labyrinthine web of mesmeric pigment loops, the present work exudes an irrepressible and hypnotically irresistible force. Drawing the viewer towards the darkened spaces contained within the tightly woven blanket of metallic paint, the present work’s almost topographical surface meanders across the extent of the picture plane, mirroring the painterly process by which it was created. Kusama’s innumerable brushstrokes flit across the canvas in radiant planes of white pigment. Each dab of paint is laid with a painstaking devotion to the act of mark-making, consuming the canvas in a field of texture and shifting light, producing an effect that is at once deeply embedded in the artist’s practice whilst being utterly contemporary.
When Kusama first arrived in New York City from Japan in June 1958, she recalls climbing to the top of the Empire State Building and looking down at the gridded city below in complete awe. At 29 years old, the young artist realised that in order to succeed in the city she would have to do something spectacular: “I aspired to grab everything that went on in the city and become a star” (the artist, quoted in “Interview with Akira Tatehata”, Laura Hoptman, Ed., Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 11). According to art historian Mignon Nixon, Kusama set out to “replace the expressive gesture with an exhaustive one, pushing painting to its limits of spatial extent and ‘monotony;’ and to obliterate the self, reconceiving contemporary painting from a subjective statement of individual consciousness to ‘nothingness’ on an epic scale” (Mignon Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in Francis Morris, Ed., Yayoi Kusama, London 2012, p. 180). Shortly after, Kusama began work on what would become her most rarefied and renowned series of white Infinity Nets canvases, a prized body of early paintings of which examples reside in some of the most renowned museums and institutions in the world.
Aesthetically, the nets originate in the artist’s early training in Nihonga painting, the traditional Japanese style of naturalistic painting. After leaving Japan, Kusama abstracted the naturalistic themes of her early works into large-scale canvases with dense repetitive patterns. Inspired by microscopic and macroscopic imagery of nature, these breath-taking extractions became physical manifestations of the artist herself, extending out from her very body.
“My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering them with. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.”
Yayoi Kusama, The Pacific Ocean, 1958, oil on canvas. Sold: Sotheby’s New York, May 2024, for USD4,658,000
It was in 1959 that Kusama exhibited her first Infinity Nets paintings in New York, radically transforming the monochrome genre championed by contemporary Abstract Expressionists into a complex vehicle of self-expression. Responding to the emotionally charged brushwork of the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Kusama’s repetitive monochromatic patterns ripple with psychological intensity, a uniquely realized manifestation of the artist herself. The impact of this series cannot be understated, in America as well as abroad. The following year in 1960, it was Kusama and Mark Rothko who were featured as the only American artists in a seminal exhibition of Monochrome paintings at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen in Germany. Extensively considered Japan’s greatest living artist today, Kusama reveals her singular vision through various forms and media, exploring infinity net patterns in sculptures, paintings, happenings and films. As a consummate example of the artist’s exploration of the eternal and infinite, Nets- Infinity radiates with the essence of the series which is inextricably linked to the artist herself.
