YAYOI KUSAMA
Gold-Sky-Nets, 2015
Acrylic on canvas
112×145.5 cm (41.1×57.3 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2015 on the reverse

Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Japan
Private Collection, Asia
Acquired from the above
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong, 19 April 2021
Acquired from the above

Auction History

Seoul Auction: 26 October 2021
Estimated: 1,700,000,000 – 3,000,000,000
KRW 3,650,000,000 / USD 3,125,309 (HAMMER)
KRW 4,197,500,000 / USD 3,594,105

REPEAT SALE

Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 19 April 2021
Estimated: HKD 6,600,000 – 8,600,000
HKD 9,250,000 / USD 1,191,058

Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生 | Gold-Sky-Nets 黃金天網 | Contemporary Art Evening Sale | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

Utterly mesmerizing and enthralling, executed in a distinctive palette of shimmering yellow-gold and black, Yayoi Kusama’s GOLD-SKY-NETS is a resplendent testament to the enduring, spellbinding power of the artist’s signature abstract mode. Executed in 2015, 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. In its intricately constructed surface of undulating forms, GOLD-SKY-NETS is a superb exemplar from the artist’s iconic series of Infinity Nets; these iconic works serve as the cornerstone of Kusama’s artistic practice and the foundation for the remainder of her sculptures, installations, and varied painterly output. The scintillating, immersive surface of GOLD-SKY-NETS 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, GOLD-SKY-NETS 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.