INFINITY-NETS (FUMW), 2007
Acrylic on canvas
161.9×130.1 cm (63.7×51.2 inches)
Signed twice, titled and dated ‘YAYOI KUSAMA Yayoi Kusama INFINITY-NETS FUMW 2007’ (on the reverse)

Provenance
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

 

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 27 May 2017
HKD 10,260,000 / USD 1,316,583

Source: Christie’s
YAYOI KUSAMA (JAPAN, B. 1929) (christies.com)

 

From beneath a vast field of bright white contours, glimpses of a silvery grey void emerge: Yayoi Kusama’s 2007 painting Infinity Nets (FUMW) develops the series of works that first brought the artist international acclaim and remain her best known and most celebrated works. Rendered in gleaming acrylic, which the artist has used since the 1980s for its quick-drying properties, the work is one of a series of white Infinity Net paintings that the artist has produced since the turn of the century, yet it shimmers with a particular lustre, the subtleties of its shifting depths and contours unfolding across the canvas with exceptional delicacy and subtlety.

Its expanse of white hints at figurative reference, the quiet chaos of a snowstorm, or the immersive interior of a cloud, while also suggesting strands of symbolic import: white as the color of purity, innocence or simply void. Yet reducing the canvas to these straightforwardly connotative readings fails to account for the painting’s larger mystery and majesty, a mass of repetition and form that slowly envelops the viewer in a psychic space that feels at once distant from reality and intimately connected with nature.