YAYOI KUSAMA
Untitled (Nets), 1959
Oil on canvas
130.8×116.5 cm (51.5×46 inches)
Signed and dated “KUSAMA 1959” on the reverse

Provenance
Günther Uecker, Dusseldorf (acquired via trade)
Private Collection
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Auction History
Phillips New-York: 18 May 2022
Estimated: USD 5,000,000 – 7,000,000
USD 10,496,000

Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempora… Lot 11 May 2022 | Phillips

 

 

 

 

Painted in 1959, Yayoi Kusama’s Untitled (Nets) belongs to the artist’s most coveted and renowned early series of white Infinity Net paintings. Teetering between the singular and infinite, the canvas surface is veiled with an intricate lattice field of small arcs and loops that appears to gently pulse before the viewer’s eyes. Upon a closer look, smooth strokes yield to swells of impasto, their individual renderings infinitely multiplying with poetic gravitas.

Untitled (Nets) marks a pivotal moment in the history of post-war abstraction, reflecting the liminal space between the painterly lush of Abstract Expressionism and the reductive aesthetic of Minimalism in which Kusama established her originality within the avant-garde. Evincing the profound impact of Kusama’s early white Infinity Net paintings, many of the artist’s peers went onto acquire them for their personal collections including Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and—in the case of the present work—Uecker. In 1960, Kusama exhibited with Uecker in the seminal Monochrome Malerei show at the Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen (where she and Rothko were the only artists selected to represent America) and, in 1962, became the only female artist to participate in the highly acclaimed ZERO international group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam alongside Uecker, Otto Piene, Lucio Fontana, and Pol Burry. With their hypnotic magnetism and accumulative buzz, Kusama’s early Infinity Nets find a close affinity with Uecker’s protruding-nail reliefs as their respective material elements appear to spiral and converge into infinite spatial realms.

Günther Uecker, Informal Structure, 1957. Hamburger Banhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image: bpk Bildagentur / Hamburger Banhof, Museum für Gegenwart / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

“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.”

Drawn to the vibrant post-war art scene in America, Kusama moved to New York City in June 1958, aspiring to “grab everything that went on in the city and become a star.” Shortly after, she embarked on her white Infinity Net paintings comprising the present composition. For hours on end often without eating or sleeping, the artist would apply one scallop of white paint after another over a grey or black ground through to the very edges of the canvas, obliterating any fixed focal point with the resulting net of ‘polka dots.’

“My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots—an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery?
Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe?”

Günther Uecker, Otto Piene, Yayoi Kusama, and Heinz Mack, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1964. Image: ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf, Holdings Heinz Mack, Inv.-No: mkp.ZERO.1V.41

In October 1959, Kusama inaugurated her groundbreaking series of white net paintings with five mural-sized examples at her first New York solo exhibition at Brata Gallery. Attracting immediate attention among contemporaries and critics, Kusama’s Infinity Nets displayed a feverish application of paint whilst consciously departed from the sweeping gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism with their obsessive repetition and meditative nature. As Laura Hoptmann commended of the works created in the same year as Untitled (Nets), “The 1959 Nets, with their severely restricted palette and all-over repetitive pattern, were nothing like what the artist had previously produced…These Infinity Nets boldly referenced the New York school and, on its own ground, challenged its hegemony. Describing the brushstrokes she employed as ‘repeated exactly in monotone, like the gear of a machine’ Kusama remembers that the painstaking sameness of the composition was a deliberate attempt to find an antidote to the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism.”