Kusama Yayoi

signed and titled in English and dated 2007 on the reverse

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Sotheby's London, 25 June 2009, lot 24
Private European Collection
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Netherlands, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years, 2008-2009, pp. 5, 6, 15, 17 and 19 (installation view)
New Zealand, Wellington, City Art Gallery Wellington, Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years, 26 September 2009 - 7 February 2010
London, Victoria Miro Gallery, Yayoi Kusama, 10 February - 5 April 2012, unpaginated

This work is accompanied with an artwork registration card issued by the artist's studio

Monumentality and Infinity
Kusama Yayoi

INFINITY NETS (OQABT) (Lot 1059) is one of the largest paintings from Kusama Yayoi's iconic series of Infinity Nets ever to appear at auction. Monumentally beautiful and expansively 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. Filling up our entire field of vision, the apparent uniformity of the five-metre net belies minute differences in the size of the individual loops and the quantity of paint on the brush: each tiny loop is painted by hand, creating a subtle yet pronounced change in effect.

Kusama exhibited her first Infinity Net paintings in New York in 1959, transforming the monochrome genre championed by her contemporaries into a complex vehicle for expressing her inner psychological being. Responding to the emotionally charged and semiotically loaded brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, Kusama invested her repetitive monochromatic patterns with psychological content and charted revolutionary new grounds. Gradually, the emerging generation of young New York artists - Minimalists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella - became major fans and collectors of her works, which foreshadowed the Minimalist aesthetics that they later championed. Kusama's influence was also keenly felt in Europe: in 1960, Kusama and Mark Rothko were the 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 legendary pioneer in post-war art, Kusama combines attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, process-based art and even pop within her works. However, her spectacular oeuvre evades any such label because of the autobiographical meaning ingrained in her artistic gesture. Diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis, Kusama "self-obliterates" her hallucinatory visions by reproducing them into nets and dots, transforming herself into a labour-intensive machine. "My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering them with. 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." ¹ In essence, the Infinity Net paintings are physical imprints of the artist herself, each loop of the net indexically linked to her very being.

Aesthetically, Kusama's Infinity Net paintings originates from her early training in Nihonga painting, the traditional Japanese style of naturalistic painting. After moving to New York in 1959, Kusama abstracted the naturalistic themes of her early works into large-scale canvases with dense repetitive patterns, whose origins in nature results in breathtaking abstractions of the eternal and the infinite. Widely considered as Japan's greatest living artist today, Kusama reveals her genius through various forms and media, exploring infinity net patterns in sculptures, environments, happenings and films. It is only in her paintings, however, where Kusama disappears entirely into her hallucinatory visions through a "monotonous, solitary act". ² Infinity Nets is thus regarded as the most archetypical and representative of all of Kusama's celebrated creations.

¹ Kusama interviewed by Gordon Brown, 1964 in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103

² Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 19