WHITE NETS (HWTOQ), 2006
Acrylic on canvas
161.9×161.9 cm (63.7×63.7 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2006 on the reverse

 

Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco
Christie’s, New York, 14 May 2009, Lot 144
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

 

Sotheby’s New-York: 15 November 2019
USD 1,520,000

Source: Sotheby’s
(#440) YAYOI KUSAMA | WHITE NETS (HWTOQ) (sothebys.com)

 

Expanding outward in an undulating lattice of loops and curls, Yayoi Kusama’s WHITE NETS (HWTOQ) is both meditative and ferocious. Executed in 2006, WHITE NETS (HWTOQ) continues the legacy of Kusama’s iconic Infinity Nets series, employing the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that epitomizes 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 WHITE NETS (HWTOQ), 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.

Kusama’s Infinity Nets inhabit a psychological realm nestled between the premeditation of grand artistic concept and the automatism of surrealism. The undulating, almost topographical surface of the work hypnotically meanders across the extent of the picture plane, mirroring the process in which it is created. Absorptive and dizzyingly ornate, WHITE NETS (HWTOQ) inspires this same entrancement through opticality, all marks coalescing to render a field of texture that fundamentally alters the space in which the work is installed. Executed in the mature period of the artist’s career, WHITE NETS (HWTOQ) is painted in acrylic pigment rather than oil. Kusama transitioned to this water-soluble medium in the 1980s, which built on her foundational training in traditional Japanese watercolor. The faster drying time of acrylic speaks to the artist’s relentless endurance and desire to paint, cultivated over years of unending artmaking. This technical development speaks to the artist’s will to enact her vision with an efficiency and ferocity that reflects her sense of purpose and emotional investment in her body of work as a whole. What the artist puts into the work, the work gives back, dilating space and time, encouraging absorption, and sharing Kusama’s painterly virtuosity and singular conceptual vision with the world.