Infinity Nets (TWOWQ), 2006
Acrylic on canvas
194×194 cm (76.4×76.4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated 2006 on the reverse
Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006
Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2016
USD 850,000
Source: Sotheby’s
(#179) Yayoi Kusama (sothebys.com)
Evident in the expansive field of clusters of scalloped brushstrokes overwhelming a vast surface, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets (TWOWQ) is a wonderful example of the artist’s ability to create a transcendent space. The Infinity Nets have been a constant throughout the artist’s celebrated and diverse oeuvre, first created in her arrival in New York in the late 1950s. Kusama’s personal hallucinatory visions, from which she had suffered as a child, inspired her compositions that led to her obsession with infinity and blurring the boundaries between illusion and reality. In the present work, executed in 2006, the circular forms organically grow throughout the surface in the endless space of innumerable networks Kusama creates. As one stands before the sumptuous surface, the handmade quality of the painting shows an astonishing technical focus by the artist. In a way evocative of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, painted between 1907-08, the markings in Kusama’s work are similarly reminiscent of Byzantine gold-ground paintings or earlier mosaics that show inspiration from a play in perspective and depth enhanced in a golden, illuminated brilliance. Kusama’s visual language, like Klimt’s, also exaggerates a prolific patterning.
In Infinity Nets (TWOWQ), a deep green monochrome lies underneath a golden hue of biomorphic forms that glide across the surface throughout each corner and edge of the canvas. Kusama’s work reveals a sublime beauty which she invented in her own visual language that conveys the complexities of her own mind. Mesmerizing and hypnotic, Infinity Nets (TWOWQ), can be singled out as a formative work by one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and a key voice of the avant-garde.