No. AA2, 1960
Oil on canvas
60.8×72.4 (24×28.5 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘1960 YAYOI KUSAMA NO. AA2’ (on the reverse)

 

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist
Thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, USA

 

Christie’s Hong-Kong: 26 November 2016
HKD 10,960,000 / USD 1,322,846

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

 

 

With its tightly knitted vivid red pattern covering the entire surface of the canvas No. AA2, painted in 1960, is a dazzling and historical example of Kusama’s celebrated Infinity Nets series. While white versions of Infinity Nets translate a meditative feeling, No. AA2’s red pulsates with energy creating the illusion of movements under the eye. Without any beginning or end and rejecting the composition, the all-over quality, an inheritance from Jackson Pollock, is the perfect expression of infinity. The painting exudes the vastness of the cosmos or the infinitesimal forms of the atoms. By materializing her inner self into painting Kusama offers the viewer a window into an infinite world.

More than just the representation, her mental illness is also the engine driving the creation as the hallucinations led her to paint compulsively for hours up to forty or fifty hours without eating or sleeping, the act of painting becoming a performance. The hallucinations are therefore the subject and the drive, and the artist and the work become one unique entity. She adopted the habit of being regularly photographed in front of new works, often wearing coordinating outfits. In these photos, the artist and her art become indistinguishable.