YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)
Enlightenment Means Living a Life Unconcernedly, 2008
Acrylic on canvas
194 x 259.1 cm (76 3/8 x 102 inches)
Signed, titled in Japanese and English, and dated (on the reverse)

Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private collection
Anon. sale; Sotheby’s, London, 12 February 2014, lot 35
Private collection
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Auction History
Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimated: USD 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
USD 4,406,000

YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929), Enlightenment Means Living a Life Unconcernedly | Christie’s (christies.com)

 

Enlightenment Means Living a Life Unconcernedly is a prime example of Yayoi Kusama’s continuing investigation of her signature ‘infinity nets’ as it returns to the monochromatic palette of her first forays into the series in the late 1950s. The endless loops and swirls of paint that cover the surface from edge to edge evoke a hallucinatory experience that Kusama has lived with since childhood in which she and her surroundings become inundated with dots, nets, and other visual stimuli within her field of view. Often painting endlessly for hours at a time, the artist sees these intricate compositions as materializations of her time spent working as well as a means to deal with a very personal affliction.

“Unable to sleep, I would get out of bed and paint… 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…”

Knowing the complex impetus behind works like the present example helps to illuminate the personal stake the artist had in such paintings and makes it clear that Kusama’s experience of the world has always been a driving force behind her revolutionary oeuvre.

Composed on the horizontal, the present work is a densely packed field of undulating loops that seem to present as knurled fingers protruding from the picture plane like a field of living coral, a rippling storm system, or some sort of expansive lifeform viewed under a microscope. Bucking traditional methods and drawing connections to Jackson Pollock’s process, Kusama paints with the canvas spread flat on the ground or a working surface. However, unlike her predecessor, the artist takes a more intimate tact and deploys her brush at close quarters instead of in violent gestures from overhead. Writing about this poignant difference, art historian Mignon Nixon explains that Kusama set out to “replace the expressive gesture with an exhaustive one, pushing painting to its limits of spatial extent and ‘monotony;’ and to obliterate the self, reconceiving contemporary painting from a subjective statement of individual consciousness to ‘nothingness’ on an epic scale” (M. Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in Yayoi Kusama, exh. cat., London, Tate Modern, 2012, p. 180). Because of her proximity to the surface, she is unable to see the entire work as she paints, so the final image is more a result of a continued absorption in the process and its ability to overtake her consciousness than any preconceived notion about composition.

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 2024 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA / Bridgeman Images.

Coming of age in Japan in the wake of World War II, Kusama turned to art as a means of nurturing a more humanistic outlook on the world. Beginning art classes at the age of thirteen, she had six solo exhibitions before 1955, and it was then that she contacted the artists Kenneth Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe in the United States. Because of this correspondence, Kusama was able to move to the United States where Callahan arranged for her first American exhibition in Seattle in 1957. After that, the artist felt the pull of New York and its hotbed of artistic innovation where the Abstract Expressionists and their acolytes were still driving aesthetic tastes. She arrived in the city in 1958 and, inspired by the seething energy she found there, created her first Infinity Nets the following year.

“In the bustle of a competitive and hectic New York, at the bottom of light and shadow of a contemporary civilization that moves forward with creaking noises, in the midst of this metropolis which symbolizes American pragmatism […] This is a form of my resistance…This infinitely repeatable rhythm and monochrome surface constitute a new painting, through an unusual ‘light’…I have long wanted to release this ‘unknowable something’ from me, release it from the muddy lake of emotion into the spiritual yonder of eternity.”

Her first infinity nets caught the eye of artists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella, and as her work continued to break new boundaries in a path tangential to the prevailing trends, she paved the way for future generations of the avant-garde.