Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
David Zwirner, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Auction History
Phillips London: 6 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 700,000 – 1,000,000
GBP 762,000 / USD 975,360

Yayoi Kusama – Modern & Contemporary A… Lot 14 March 2025 | Phillips

 

Subtle and refined, this elegant work with its softly luxurious, neutral color palette is an exquisite example of Yayoi Kusama’s revered Infinity Nets series. The intricate loops and swirls create a textured, meditative surface to the canvas; a particularly sophisticated iteration of her ongoing series, the natural tone is both opulent and understated, the faint white-ecru of the painted layer blending delicately with the light ground. Open about her own deeply personal experiences of hallucinations and obsessive-compulsive disorder, painting was both a creative force and a cathartic outlet for the artist, with her visions fueling her persistent search for cosmic themes of eternity, obliteration and the infinite in her practice.

“I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room.”

In 1957, Kusama left Japan for America, where she became immersed in the American contemporary post war art scene thriving during mid-century New York City. It was here that she first began working on her Infinity Nets, a series that she would continue to develop throughout the subsequent decades of her career. On the heels of the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Kusama undoubtedly took some of the key tenets of gestural mark-making, large-scale immersive canvases and process-orientated painting that had dominated in recent years as a point of departure, elements of which can be seen translated and embedded into her practice to this day. Yet, at her debut solo exhibition at Brata Gallery in 1959, her early, white Infinity Nets – exclusively white and the epitome of simplicity and refinement – were received with admiration and revelation; their contained, uniform simplicity was a remarkable deviation from the untamed overtness of the Abstract Expressionists.

Introspective and serene, Kusama’s Infinity Nets marked a stark contrast to the explosive, raw intensity of Action Painting popularized by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Instead, the tight, meticulous brushstrokes and subtle, monochromatic palettes evoke a more calming, contemplative effect. With an emphasis on her chosen medium of paint and the labor-intensive process of application, layer upon layer, to create an undulating surface rich with peaks of impasto and smoother, fluid lines, Kusama’s Infinity Nets presaged many of the principles subsequently upheld by the Minimalists. On her flight from Japan to New York, the artist was struck by the endless, rippling Pacific Ocean beneath her, a birds-eye view of the great expanse of water that informed her artistic vision, she endeavored to capture and distil the essence of its vastness in her work. This is reflected in the sensory unity of her painting, breaking down elements of colur, form, mass, figure and ground into a boundless, reverberating whole. The Minimalists placed a similar emphasis on medium and process, resulting in pared back, monochromatic abstraction in its most distilled, purest form. The artist’s 1959 Brata exhibition, for example, caught the attention of Donald Judd, who wrote in his review of the exhibition for Art News: ‘the five white, very large paintings in this show are strong, advanced in concept and realized. The space is shallow, close to the surface and achieved by innumerable small arcs superimposed on a black ground overlain with a wash of white. The effect is both complex and simple. Essentially it is produced by the interaction of the two close, somewhat parallel, vertical planes, at points merging at the surface plane and at others diverging slightly but powerfully…The strokes are applied with a great assurance and strength which even a small area conveys. The total quality suggests an analogy to a large, fragile, but vigorously carved grill or to a massive, solid lace.’

[Left] Brice Marden, Untitled (Black and Cream Grid), c. 1964, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Artwork: © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025
[Right] Brice Marden, Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge), 1989–91, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Artwork: © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

Infinity Nets (APPGF), with its neutral, muted palette also draws distinct visual parallels with the work of Brice Marden who, like Kusama, was a figure who referenced many of the artistic tendencies that were percolating at the time, whilst also crucially resisting any definitive sort of categorization. He, too, was interested in the potential held by the inherent materiality of his works: ‘he was a painter of rare insight into the pleasure and poetry of his medium, always dedicated to gesture, chance, substance—the elemental matters of art.’ In Marden’s earlier monochromatic works, there is a more pronounced emphasis on repetition and pattern, and the formal matter of art making; later, he adopted a more spontaneous and meandering approach, creating a sense of movement that recalls the natural ebb and flow of the landscape, both of which can be likened to aspects of Kusama’s labyrinthine nets.

His Cold Mountain series (1988-91), for instance, deeply influenced by the poetry of Han Shan, a hermit and poet from the Tang Dynasty, explores wide-reaching themes surrounding spirituality and the relationship between humankind and the natural world – the fluidity of these works, in a departure from the earlier rigidity of his geometric works from the 60s, lends them a tranquil quality that visually recall Kusama’s introspective paintings, synchronously considering both the physical landscape and the interior landscape of the mind. Transcending the intersections between any distinct movement, the breadth and depth of Kusama’s unique visual language – spanning a remarkable seven decades – is testament to the enduring nature of her complex and singular approach to art making. Painted in 2017, and coming to auction for the first time, Infinity Nets (APPGF) represents a culmination of decades of refinement and serves as a perfect example of the timelessness of her practice, as she ‘continues to produce compelling and challenging work, and should not be beholden to a single historical moment.’