Yayoi Kusama

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years, 2008-09, pp. 5, 6, 15, 17 and 19, illustrated in installation views in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer and the dark greys are cooler in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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This work has been requested fot the exhibition Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years at City Art Gallery Wellington, New Zealand from 26 September 2009 to 7 February 2010. 

One of the highlights of Yayoi Kusama's recent travelling retrospective at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the present work is the largest painting from the artist's career-long series of Infinity Nets ever to appear at auction. Monumentally beautiful and disorientating, this vast, mural-sized canvas is spectacular for its rhythmic undulations of small, thickly painted loops that create a lyrical and mysterious shifting structure. Entirely filling our field of vision, the uniformity of the five-metre net is broken down by its hand-painted nature, whereby minute differences in the size of the individual loops or the quantity of paint on the brush create a subtle yet pronounced change in effect.

 

Kusama produced her first Infinity Net paintings in 1959, exhibited in New York's Brata Gallery, transforming the monochrome genre championed by her contemporaries into a complex and pioneering vehicle for expressing her psychological inner being. Although central to New York's post-Abstract Expressionism art discourse in the 1960s, Kusama did not affiliate herself to any art movement. She responded to the emotionally charged and semiotically loaded brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning in her idiosyncratic way by investing her repetitive monochromatic patterns with psychological content. Yet in their aesthetics, her large scale Infinity Nets charted new grounds. Gradually, the emerging generation of young New York artists - Minimalists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella - became major fans of her work, which foreshadowed the Minimalist aesthetics that they later championed. Her influence was also keenly felt in Europe and in 1960 Kusama, together with Mark Rothko, was one of only two American-based artists to be included, alongside Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, in a seminal exhibition of Monochrome paintings at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen in Germany.

Considered a pioneer in post-war art, in her work Kusama combines attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, process-based art and even pop. Nonetheless, it evades any such label because of the autobiographical meaning ingrained in her artistic gesture. Diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis, Kusama uses her art to 'self-obliterate' her hallucinatory visions through the process of reproducing them into the Nets and Dots of her painting, thereby transforming herself into a labour-intensive machine. "My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me" (the artist interviewed by Gordon Brown, 1964 in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103). Compulsively painting, often for days at a time, Kusama poured herself physically and emotionally into her canvases. The process of painting the Infinity Nets is central to the meaning of the work. In essence these works are physical imprints of the artist herself, with each loop of the net indexically linked to her being. Kusama frequently poses with her Infinity Nets, "standing in front of, on, above, or below to ensure the viewer makes the connection between her physical self and her work" (Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 46).  

Kusama's Infinity Net paintings are inspired by natural observation that originates from her early training in Japan in Nihonga painting, the traditional Japanese style of naturalistic painting with which Kusama experimented with small drawings in her youth. After moving to New York in 1959, Kusama abstracted the naturalistic themes of her early works into large-scale canvases with dense repetitive patterns, which finally evolved into her iconic style. While in her early pivotal paintings Kusama applied oil on canvas, in her more recent works, such as Infinity Nets, 2007, the artist employs acrylic paint into her serial artistic gesture, which ultimately removes the three-dimensionality from the chain-linked circular forms. This more conscious structure results in breathtaking and eternal reflections of the infinity. "My net paintings were very large canvases without compositions - without beginning, end or centre. The entire canvas would be occupied by monochromatic nets. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling" (the artist interviewed by Gordon Brown, 1964 in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103).

Yayoi Kusama is today considered Japan's greatest living artist. During her life devoted to art and art dedicated to her life, Kusama reveals her genius through various forms and media, exploring the infinity net patterns in sculptures, environments, happenings and films. However, it is in her paintings where, through a 'monotonous, solitary act' (Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 19), Kusama emerges entirely into her hallucinatory visions. For the visual poetry, purity of the composition and its monumental scale, Infinity Nets is the archetype of the most representative series for the artist.