Kusama Yayoi

signed in English, titled in Japanese and English and dated 2006 on the reverse, framed

Private Collection
Japan, The Market Auction, 21 February 2008, lot 142
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

This work is in very good condition. Upon close inspection, there are tiny spots of green pigment on the tips of the impasto at the lower right corner, possibly from the time of execution. No evidence of restoration under UV examination.
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Angel from the East
Kusama Yayoi

She is an angel blessed with an innocent, rare intelligence and an iron will who has made friends with the devil who has failed to overpower her. Kusama’s simple but complex world is an endless enigma that will always be beyond my understanding. -- Robert Nickas¹

An enthralling, delicately sensuous work from Yayoi Kusama’s most celebrated series, Infinity Nets (OBBXT) (Lot 1038) evinces a sublime duality that pairs the patterned feminine intricacy of lacework with the heroic scale of a Pollock canvas. With its distinctive palette of white over red, the piece emanates a prominent Japanese spirit with the colours of the country’s national flag whilst radiating Kusama’s wholly unique and globally iconic aesthetic that defies any categorisation of East and West. The sea of dexterous white arcs overlaid over a red foundation results in an overall engulfing hue of pearly pink, activating an ethereal aura of alluring poetic transcendence. Created from infinite quiet repetitive strokes, the work pulses with a rhythmically flowing surface that seems to alternately expand and recede from the viewer, evoking the signature hypnotic serenity that epitomizes Kusama’s entire legendary oeuvre.

In the 1950s, Kusama was one of the earliest Japanese artists to venture to New York in the post-war era. The debut of her ground-breaking Infinity Nets first stunned the art world in 1959 and ignited her whirlwind rise to international prominence. Both Kusama’s iconic net motif and the colour red, which was the colour for expelling demons and physical ailments in Japanese folk tradition, were inextricably linked to the artist’s mental illness. As a young woman growing up whilst her country was still at war, Kusama was diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder after suffering from years of powerful hallucinations. In the artist’s own words, “My room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an allusion but reality”.²

Kusama’s hallucinations led her to paint feverishly and obsessively, sometimes for forty or fifty hours without a break, in an attempt to at once give a voice to, and exorcise, her overwhelming visions. The repeated all-encompassing strokes of her Infinity Nets are thus creations that were cathartic and healing: recalling her early years in New York, Kusama once said that “day after day I forgot my coldness and hunger by painting“. The infinity nets were, for the artist, the only way of dealing with her demons and connecting to the transcendent, the universal, and ultimately to personal peace and utopia; as Kusama explained: “By obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe”.³

After an explosive rise to stardom in New York, Kusama retreated into a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1975, withdrawing into two decades of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing an extraordinarily prolific body of work. Kusama's international revival began at the 1993 Venice Biennale, which re-ignited the artist’s rise to immortal stardom. Executed in 2006, the current lot employs acrylic paint instead of oil—a critical transition that the artist undertook in the 1980s as a homecoming return to water-based medium: the artist began her career with nihonga, traditional Japanese watercolor. The quick drying time of acrylic attests to Kusama’s heightened ambition as well as skill, stamina and endurance after decades of ceaseless painting. With each brushstroke marking a moment of time passing but not past, Kusama’s laborious technique “exiles narrative in preference to the temporality of enactment”, dilating time and space with one focused, efficient and hyperbolic gesture, repeated ad infinitum. A mature and virtuosic reincarnation of Kusama’s original Nets canvases in the late 1950s, the current lot epitomizes the artist’s unique brand of cosmic abstraction and ethereal infiniteness.

¹ "Yayoi Kusama: Formulate Infinity" in Yayoi Kusama: I Want to Live Forever, Milan 2009, p. 29
² Yayoi Kusama, New York, 2000, p.36
³ Quoted in G. Turner, "Yayoi Kusama," Bomb, v. 66, Winter 1999