YAYOI KUSAMA
Infinity Nets (SENN), 2011
Acrylic on canvas
130×130 cm (51.1 x 51.1 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘SENN INFINITY NETS YAYOI KUSAMA 2011’
(on the reverse)
Provenance
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011
Phillips London: 3 March 2022
GBP 1,293,000
Source: Phillips
Yayoi Kusama – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 33 March 2022 | Phillips
A stunning and unusual example of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s highly significant series, Infinity Nets (SENN) is a deeply contemplative and absorbing black-on-black painting that draws on a cosmic sense of expansion and infinitude. Applying the same endlessly repeating knots of paint across the wide expanse of the canvas, Kusama approaches Infinity Nets (SENN) in much the same manner as the other works from the series. However, instead of the bold color contrasts between black and white, red and green, or yellow and black more regularly employed by the artist to establish a vivid optical tension between surface and painted ground, Infinity Nets (SENN) boldly confounds all pictorial space, confronting the viewer instead with a sense of the extreme materiality of paint, and the immersive optical effects of the shimmering nets. An exercise in obliteration, within the radically limited format of the square canvas, Kusama is still able to create incredible pictorial tension and drama, the energetic impasto of her knotted loops animating the impenetrable depths of the black ground and creating complex internal rhythms as the eye transitions from passages of thicker impasto to smoother sections of thinner and lighter paint. Disrupting the flat surface of the canvas and picking up patterns of shifting light as it passes, Kusama’s treatment of paint here animates Infinity Nets (SENN) with a forceful dynamism, reflecting the obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite that best characterizes her practice.
Deeply rooted in the artist’s personal history, the endlessly looping and repeating whorls seen here are the key motif reinvented across Kusama’s staggering 70-year career and can be traced across the Infinity Net canvases, her soft sculptures or ‘accumulations’, her provocative 1960s Happenings, and the Infinity Rooms that are currently the subject of sell-out exhibitions in London and internationally. Like these disorientating mirrored environments – one of which was executed in the same year as the present work and is currently installed at Tate Modern as part of the extended Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms – the overall effect of these looping and repeating patterns that spread and cover the canvases of her Infinity Nets is at once immersive and deeply moving.