YAYOI KUSAMA
Infinity – Nets (OQABT), 2007
Acrylic on canvas
304×540 cm (119 5/8 x 212 5/8 inches)

Provenance
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Sotheby’s London: 25 June 2009
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 400,000
GBP 337,250

(#24) Yayoi Kusama (sothebys.com)

 

One of the highlights of Yayoi Kusama’s recent travelling retrospective at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the present work is the largest painting from the artist’s career-long series of Infinity Nets ever to appear at auction. Monumentally beautiful and disorientating, this vast, mural-sized canvas is spectacular for its rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops that create a lyrical and mysterious shifting structure. Entirely filling our field of vision, the uniformity of the five-meter net is broken down by its hand-painted nature, whereby minute differences in the size of the individual loops or the quantity of paint on the brush create a subtle yet pronounced change in effect.

Kusama produced her first Infinity Net paintings in 1959, exhibited in New York’s Brata Gallery, transforming the monochrome genre championed by her contemporaries into a complex and pioneering vehicle for expressing her psychological inner being. Although central to New York’s post-Abstract Expressionism art discourse in the 1960s, Kusama did not affiliate herself to any art movement. She responded to the emotionally charged and semiotically loaded brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning in her idiosyncratic way by investing her repetitive monochromatic patterns with psychological content. Yet in their aesthetics, her large scale Infinity Nets charted new grounds. Gradually, the emerging generation of young New York artists – Minimalists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella – became major fans of her work, which foreshadowed the Minimalist aesthetics that they later championed. Her influence was also keenly felt in Europe and in 1960 Kusama, together with Mark Rothko, was one of only two American-based artists to be included, alongside Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, in a seminal exhibition of Monochrome paintings at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen in Germany.

“My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. 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.” 

Considered a pioneer in post-war art, in her work Kusama combines attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, process-based art and even pop. Nonetheless, it evades any such label because of the autobiographical meaning ingrained in her artistic gesture. Diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis, Kusama uses her art to ‘self-obliterate’ her hallucinatory visions through the process of reproducing them into the Nets and Dots of her painting, thereby transforming herself into a labor-intensive machine.

“My net paintings were very large canvases without compositions – without beginning, end or centre. The entire canvas would be occupied by monochromatic nets. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling”

Compulsively painting, often for days at a time, Kusama poured herself physically and emotionally into her canvases. The process of painting the Infinity Nets is central to the meaning of the work. In essence these works are physical imprints of the artist herself, with each loop of the net indexically linked to her being. Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings are inspired by natural observation that originates from her early training in Japan in Nihonga painting, the traditional Japanese style of naturalistic painting with which Kusama experimented with small drawings in her youth. After moving to New York in 1959, Kusama abstracted the naturalistic themes of her early works into large-scale canvases with dense repetitive patterns, which finally evolved into her iconic style. While in her early pivotal paintings Kusama applied oil on canvas, in her more recent works, such as Infinity Nets, 2007, the artist employs acrylic paint into her serial artistic gesture, which ultimately removes the three-dimensionality from the chain-linked circular forms. This more conscious structure results in breathtaking and eternal reflections of the infinity.