Nets Obsession, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
162.3×162.3 cm (63.9×63.9 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Yayoi Kusama 2004 “NETS OBSESSION”’ on the reverse

 

Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004

Phillips Hong-Kong: 8 June 2021
HKD 25,660,000 / USD 3,306,743

Source: Phillips
Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempor… Lot 25 June 2021 | Phillips

 

Nets Obsession is a beautiful example of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings, her most celebrated body of work exploring the net motif that has preoccupied the artist since 1958. While her first Infinity Nets consist of white lattice structures on black backgrounds, thickly impastoed circular forms that create a shimmering overlay like textured lace, her later works grew to be flatter over time, her brushstrokes less visible. As a self-taught painter, Kusama’s approach to painting is utterly unique, allowing her innermost self to flow onto the surface in a process she later referred to as “self-therapy”. This blue aquatic present work is beautifully emblematic of the inclusion of color in her net paintings, suggestive of a marine-scape in which living organisms sway in the moving current, hypnotizing the viewer in the serenity of its depths. In Nets Obsession, Kusama delicately places an array of white, weave-like curls onto a surface of midnight blue, creating a capricious, animate image as the white mixes with the background to create fluctuating tonality. The painting appears to resemble a coral reef, viewed as if a diver swimming above, watching the marine life and coral polyps sway in the gentle currents below.

The feeling of viewing a subaquatic scene is reinforced by the loose, thinly applied paint which looks itself to have been purposefully watered down. Kusama’s individual strokes blur into one, achieving the effect of totality and evoking her interest in the theme of interconnectivity. Further, the thinness of her paint emphasizes the dexterity and fearlessness of each stroke, as there is nowhere to hide, no thick paint to obscure a misstep of hand. The surface seems to change as the viewer’s eye scans over different parts of the canvas, not dictated by a particular focal point or composition, but coming alive under the viewer’s activating gaze. The image shimmers with a metallic sheen when hit by direct light, almost cool to the touch and mimicking the effect of sunlight plunging through water and refracting in the ripples and waves. Here, the variation of paint thickness allows Kusama to capture a sense of depth and movement that is not necessarily common to her Infinity Nets, typically more porous in their appearance. In Nets Obsession, the artist creates a rhythmic structure that advances and retreats, ebbs and flows, not confined to the constraints of the canvas but seeping out towards us in all directions.