YAYOI KUSAMA (Born 1929)
Infinity-Nets [AOTWX], 2008
Acrylic on canvas
194×259 cm (76 3/8 x 102 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 2008 ”INFINITY-NETS. AOTWX”’ (on the reverse)
Provenance
Ota Fina Art, Tokyo
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Purchased from the above in 2009
Auction History
Christie’s Paris: 19 October 2023
Estimated: EUR 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
EUR 3,065,000 / USD 3,239,615
Yayoi Kusama (née en 1929) (christies.com)
Infinity-Nets (AOTWX) (2008) is a large-scale example of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Nets”. Delicate, lacy webs of white impasto are woven across a dark backdrop. The pigment is applied in countless small, looping strokes. Following no rigid system, they spiral out from various nodal centers across the canvas. The organic, all-consuming surface appears to pulse, billow and vibrate. To create these works Kusama paints obsessively, sometimes for many hours at a time, in a process of meditative transcendence.
Infinity-Nets (AOTWX) was painted when Kusama was in her late seventies and enjoying increasing critical acclaim. In 2006 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Painting, Japan’s most prestigious international art prize. The cellular forms of the ‘’Infinity Nets’’—and the related polka dot—are among her most recognizable motifs. They have swarmed over her paintings, her sculptures, her mirror installations, and even the nude bodies of participants in her 1960s “happenings”.
” My room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns],” she recalled; “my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an illusion but reality.”
Kusama’s patterns stem from hallucinations that she suffered during her childhood in Japan. Traumatized by a distressing home environment, she was struck by apparitions of dots, nets and flowers that threatened to swallow her whole world. Later, in her art’s endless, repetitive forms, Kusama harnessed these overwhelming visions as a means of refuge and release. Kusama left Japan for New York in 1957, and debuted her first ‘’Infinity Nets’’ there two years later. Like the present work, these early examples were white. Their admirers included the Minimalist artist and critic Donald Judd. “The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American,” he wrote. “Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent.”
Indeed, while these works bear comparison to the immersive, all-over surfaces of Abstract Expressionism—as well as to the kinetic visual fields of Zero artists like Günther Uecker, with whom Kusama shared several European exhibitions during the 1960s—they form part of an investigation that is entirely Kusama’s own. The artist returned to Japan in 1973, and soon afterwards took up residence in the Tokyo psychiatric hospital where she still lives today. The ‘’Infinity Nets’’ remain at the heart of her prolific, esoteric practice well into the twenty-first century.