Infinity Nets (OBBXT), 2006
Acrylic on canvas
100×100 cm (39.4×39.4 inches)
Signed in English, titled in Japanese and English and dated 2006 on the reverse

 

Provenance
Private Collection Japan
The Market Auction, 21 February 2008, lot 142
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

 

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 2 April 2017
HKD 5,860,000 / USD 754,076

Source: Sotheby’s
(#1038) Kusama Yayoi (sothebys.com)

 

 

An enthralling, delicately sensuous work from Yayoi Kusama’s most celebrated series, Infinity Nets (OBBXT) evinces a sublime duality that pairs the patterned feminine intricacy of lacework with the heroic scale of a Pollock canvas. With its distinctive palette of white over red, the piece emanates a prominent Japanese spirit with the colors of the country’s national flag whilst radiating Kusama’s wholly unique and globally iconic aesthetic that defies any categorization of East and West. The sea of dexterous white arcs overlaid over a red foundation result in an overall engulfing hue of pearly pink, activating an ethereal aura of alluring poetic transcendence. Created from infinite quiet repetitive strokes, the work pulses with a rhythmically flowing surface that seems to alternately expand and recede from the viewer, evoking the signature hypnotic serenity that epitomizes Kusama’s entire legendary oeuvre.

After an explosive rise to stardom in New York, Kusama retreated into a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1975, withdrawing into two decades of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing an extraordinarily prolific body of work. Kusama’s international revival began at the 1993 Venice Biennale, which re-ignited the artist’s rise to immortal stardom. Executed in 2006, Infinity Nets (OBBXT) employs acrylic paint instead of oil—a critical transition that the artist undertook in the 1980s as a homecoming return to water-based medium: the artist began her career with nihonga, traditional Japanese watercolor. The quick drying time of acrylic attests to Kusama’s heightened ambition as well as skill, stamina and endurance after decades of ceaseless painting. With each brushstroke marking a moment of time passing but not past, Kusama’s laborious technique “exiles narrative in preference to the temporality of enactment”, dilating time and space with one focused, efficient and hyperbolic gesture, repeated ad infinitum. A mature and virtuosic reincarnation of Kusama’s original Nets canvases in the late 1950s, Infinity Nets (OBBXT) epitomizes the artist’s unique brand of cosmic abstraction and ethereal infiniteness.