YAYOI KUSAMA
Infinity-Nets (KYKEY), 2017
Acrylic on canvas
162×162 cm (62.7×62.7 inches)
Signed Yayoi Kusama, titled Infinity-Nets KYKEY and dated 2017 (on the verso)

 

Provenance
David Zwirner, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Auction History
Sotheby’s London: 2 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
GBP 2,273,500 / USD 3,030,570

Infinity-Nets (KYKEY) | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

Pulsating and dancing with rhythmic motion, Infinity Nets (KYKEY) is testament to Yayoi Kusama’s captivating mastery of spatial abstraction from the artist’s most celebrated corpus of paintings. Exemplary of Kusama’s iconic style of abstraction, which established her extraordinary position in art history, the present work consists of an endless maze of oscillating, kaleidoscopic patterns that are made up of intricately undulating white lines atop an electrifying black ground. Executed in 2017, the present work continues the legacy of Kusama’s iconic series of Infinity Nets, employing the same repetitive and hypnotic mark-making that functions as the conceptual nexus of the artist’s obsession and unconscious, ultimately culminating in a canvas of peak visual and psychological intensity.

In Infinity Nets (KYKEY), Kusama’s restricted palette imparts a sense of ethereality onto the canvas; the work is vaporous, texturally anomalous and full of reflected light. The artist’s labyrinthine web of mesmeric pigment loops display irrepressible force, drawing the viewer irresistibly towards the shimmering spaces contained within the tightly woven blanket of paint. The undulating, almost topographical surface of the work hypnotically meanders across the extent of the picture plane, mirroring the process in which it is created. Kusama’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. For all the flurry of countless brushstrokes across this grand canvas, with its elegant palette and intricate construction, the work remains entirely serene and utterly spellbinding to the artist and viewer alike.

From their inception, Kusama’s Infinity Nets ever so quietly dispelled traditional rules and expectations of pictorial space, painterly narratives and calculated compositions. Instead, through their rather organic production, works such as Infinity Nets (KYKEY) celebrate the sheer materiality of Kusama’s canvas while delving into a dizzying exploration of optical sensations. While not entirely random nor overly precise, the artist’s carefully painted dots and arcs weave together a mesmerizing web.

 “[Infinity Nets are] without beginning, end, or center. The entire canvas would be occupied by [a] monochromatic net. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling” 

A mesmeric corpus produced across a period of over fifty years, the Infinity Nets serve as the cornerstone of Kusama’s artistic practice, and the foundation for the remainder of her painterly and sculptural output, inhabiting a psychological realm nestled between the premeditation of grand artistic concept and the automatism of surrealism.

Kusama first started the Infinity Nets in June 1958, shortly after moving from Japan to New York City. Driven by a great ambition to become a successful artist and rival the dominant male voices of the time, she responded to the prevailing avant-garde language of Abstract Expressionism by turning personal psychological impulse into an ingenious formal concern. Indeed, the Infinity Nets mark a manifestation of and coping mechanism for Kusama’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and hallucinations brought on by a diagnosed psychological condition. Kusama struggled with visions of infinitely oscillating, kaleidoscopic patterns throughout her childhood in Japan, the memories of which she has described in her own words: “I was always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me” (Yayoi Kusama quoted in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 103). Although she took on the all-over compositional modus of the Abstract Expressionist painters, Kusama developed all-encompassing visual semantics that privileged repetition and infinity, ultimately defying categorization or affiliation to any specific artistic movement. Absorptive and dizzyingly ornate, in Infinity Nets (KYKEY) Kusama radically redefines the nature of abstract painting in bold defiance of gestural abstraction, all marks coalescing to render a field of texture that fundamentally alters the space in which the work is installed. Indeed, works such as the present affirm Kusama’s status as one of the most important creators of the last century.