Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Gagosian Gallery
Private Collection, Monaco
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Auction History
Phillips London: 7 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 1,800,000 – 2,500,000
GBP 2,105,000 / USD 2,669,140

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 8 March 2024 | Phillips

 

The largest red Infinity Net to come to auction, its entire surface covered in tightly rendered whorls of deep cadmium red that continue across the canvas edge, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) is a strikingly elegant iteration of Yayoi Kusama’s ongoing series. Vibrant and dynamic, the rhythmic exchanges between passages of thicker impasto and smoother sections of thinner paint here charge the large-scale composition with a remarkable vitality. Conjuring images of cosmic infinitude and cellular structure it is at once expansive and inward looking, the square format of the canvas intensifying this sense of pictorial tension and drama as the tightly knotted forms seem to vibrate and react against each other and the barely discernible black ground beneath. Completely immersive, the work deftly captures the almost obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite that best characterizes Kusama’s practice, of which the Infinity Nets are especially representative of.

Deeply rooted in the artist’s personal history, the endlessly looping and repeating whorls seen here are the key motif reinvented across Kusama’s staggering 70 year career and can be traced across the Infinity Net canvases, her soft sculptures or ‘accumulations’, her provocative 1960s Happenings, and the Infinity Rooms that are currently the subject of sell-out exhibitions in London and internationally. As a child growing up on her family’s seed farm in Matsumoto, Kusama first experienced the profound visual and auditory hallucinations that continue to ground discussions of her practice and her persistent search for infinity and obliteration in her immersive works. Significantly, the deep red of the present work seems to return the artist to her first and most significant of these visions, vividly recounted by the artist some decades later describing how ‘One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up […] I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space.’

Yayoi Kusama in her New York studio, 1961. Image/Artwork: © YAYOI KUSAMA

A favorite color in Kusama’s repertoire, the intricate red lattice work of this 2008 work visually recalls some of Kusama’s most iconic works from this earlier period, immediately evoking the red polka dots of her 1965 Infinity Mirror Room – Phali’s Field. Prefiguring her installation art and effectively bringing together her soft sculptures, mirrored environments, and the rich palette of the present work, Infinity Mirror Room-Phali’s Field ‘made actual the implied infinity of [her] drawings and paintings’, a model that clearly still resonated with the artist some 40 years later. Dressed entirely in red, in this work Kusama directly identified herself as one of the innumerable polka dots surrounding her, a vivid actualization and transcendence ‘of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’.

Deftly combining the obsessional, repetitive, and immersive qualities for which she is best known, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) is particularly sophisticated and rhythmic example of Kusama’s landmark series and cornerstone of her practice. In her blending of seriality with modes of all-over painting in this manner, Kusama sought not only to disrupt distinctions between figure and ground, but to obliterate the nature of canvas completely, ‘to cover the entire surface, filling out the void.’ Examples of Kusama’s vibrant red Infinity Nets are held in renowned permanent collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Harn Museum of Art, Florida. A striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s work for decades, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) also emphasizes the close conceptual connections between the series and her installation and performance work, positioning it at the heart of her 70-year practice.