YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929)
Infinity Nets (QNTBH), 2006
Acrylic on canvas
161.9 x 130.2 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/4 inches)
Signed, titled in English and Japanese and dated 2006 on the reverse
Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Private Collection
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Auction History
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 5 April 2023
Estimated: HKD 20,000,000 – 30,000,000
HKD 24,045,000 / USD 3,063,095
Spectacular for its rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) created in 2006 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 white lines atop a luminous grey-blue background. Filling up our entire field of vision, the apparent uniformity of the over-a-meter net belies minute differences in the size of the individual loops and the quantity of paint utilized in every stroke: each tiny loop is painted by hand, creating a subtle yet pronounced change in effect throughout the composition.
Continuing the legacy of Kusama’s most iconic series that the artist first exhibited in New York in 1959, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) employs the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that has stood as the most enduring iteration of her indelible aesthetic. Created almost 50 years after she began this expansive series, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) closely corresponds with these very first examples owing to its wonderful texture and exclusively white-monochromicity.
Full of reflected light and the artist’s labyrinthine web of mesmeric pigment loops, Infinity Nets (QNTBH) exudes an irrepressible and hypnotically irresistible force. Drawing the viewer towards the shimmering spaces contained within the tightly woven blanket of 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 pile onto one another, culminating in some parts of the canvas in mounds of expressive impasto, and solidifying into radiating planes of white pigment in others. Each dab of paint is laid with a painstaking devotion to the act of mark-making, consuming the canvas in a field of texture.