INFINITY-NETS (NOLM), 2013
Acrylic on canvas
162×130.3 cm (63.7×51.2 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2013 on the reverse

 

Provenance
Ota Fine Arts
Acquired from the above by the present owner

 

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 6 October 2020
HKD 29,215,000 / USD 1,271,629

Source: Sotheby’s
YAYOI KUSAMA 草間彌生 | INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) 無限網 (NOLM) | Contemporary Art Evening Sale | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

Utterly mesmerizing and enthralling, executed in a distinctive palette of gold and chartreuse, INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) is a resplendent testament to the enduring, spellbinding power of the artist’s signature abstract mode. Executed in 2013, the present work marks the apex of a period of major and highly celebrated retrospectives that wholly solidified Kusama’s status and significance within the context of the contemporary art canon. The scintillating, immersive surface of INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) achieves the artist’s ultimate goal: to momentarily draw the viewer into Kusama’s own, definitive experience of infinity.

Enveloping the viewer within its gleaming surface, INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) is at once meditative and emphatic, intricate and explosive, utterly abstract and entirely specific. Below the labyrinthine web of golden loops, the saturated azure hue of the painting’s ground invites the viewer to immerse him or herself within its chartreuse depths. Kusama’s use of metallic pigment imbues the present work with an aura of exquisite light; the work is ethereal, texturally anomalous and full of reflected illumination. 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. At first glance, the disparate layers of pigment are deceptively legible; yet upon further inspection, the hypnotic skeins of paints begin to dilate and pulsate, creating an extraordinary and intriguing visual interplay within the painting’s depths.