YAYOI KUSAMA | Infinity Nets (OQ4)

Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo Private Collection, Tokyo

Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, 13 May 2010, Lot 124

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly cooler in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Yayoi Kusama first started the Infinity Nets in 1958 shortly after her arrival in New York. Driven by a great ambition to become a successful artist and rival the dominant male voices of the time, she responded to the prevailing avant-garde language of Abstract Expressionism by turning personal psychological impulse into an ingenious formal concern. Taking on the all-over compositional modus of Ab Ex painters, Kusama developed an all-encompassing visual semantics that privileged repetition and infinity. Although she was first affiliated with the Ab Ex movement in New York, Kusama has defied categrorisation throughout her career. In Japan, her earliest work was considered Surrealist, while the 1960s brought group exhibitions alongside Pop artists and the European ZERO; indeed, the breadth of her practice has spanned performance, video, sculpture, installation, and even literature. Amongst this diverse body of work, however, it is the Infinity Nets that stand as the most iconic and enduring iteration of her ground-breaking practice. Created almost 50 years after she began this expansive series, Infinity Nets (OQ4) closely corresponds with the very first examples owing to its wonderful texture and exclusively white-monochromicity. Before moving to New York in the late 1950s, Kusama sought the advice of American abstract artist Georgia O’Keeffe: she sent O’Keeffe examples of her early work – surreal yet anthropomorphic watercolour pieces – and the two artists began a correspondence that would last until the end of O’Keeffe’s life; indeed, for Kusama, their exchange was the deciding factor in her choice to emigrate in late 1957. With the elder artist, Kusama shared an obsession with organic plant-like forms that simultaneously evoke the somatic: her earliest watercolours evoke a kind of florid abstract corporeality that can also be found in the cell-like repetition that constitute the Infinity Nets. When they finally met in New York in 1961, O’Keeffe generously introduced the young Kusama to her dealer in New York, Edith Halpert, who, in support of the burgeoning Japanese artist, bought one of the early Infinity Nets.

Executed in viscous glots of white oil paint over a black ground, these densely textured paintings psychologically narrate Kusama’s first difficult months in New York. Having been blighted by hallucinations since she was a child, Kusama used the creation of these works to channel and work through psychological hardship exacerbated by tough living conditions and an entirely alien environment: “Unable to sleep, I would get out of bed and paint. There was no other way to endure the cold and the hunger so I pushed myself on to ever more intense work […] I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. 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” (Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, pp. 17-18, and p. 20). While a psychological and hallucinatory reading has always been considered central to understanding Kusama’s work, it is also worth contextualising it within the dominant art historical discourse of its moment.

Art historian Jo Applin has contended that the infinite repetition and environmental proliferation of nets reflects Kusama’s alienation from a “macho art scene of a city that, for a Japanese woman with minimal English, was almost impossible to penetrate fully” (Jo Applin, ‘I’m Here, but Nothing: Yayoi Kusama’s Environments’, in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and travelling), Yayoi Kusama, 2011-12, p. 188). Nonetheless, intent on having her work appraised in New York, Kusama boldly took on the machismo rhetoric of all-over abstraction and re-imagined it as meticulous and membranous. Taking the form of expansive canvases over which viscous arcs of white paint coalesce to form an unending openwork chain of linked concentric circles, the Infinity Nets are imbued with a libidinous bodily energy. Art historian Mignon Nixon also argues that Kusama’s large scale Nets parodied the excesses of Pollock and trumped the phallic performance of Abstract Expressionism through an artistic persona that was exoticised, sexually provocative, and self-consciously feminine (Mignon Nixon, ‘Infinity Politics’ in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and travelling), Yayoi Kusama, op. cit., pp. 179-80). Exploiting her ‘otherness’ to its utmost advantage, Kusama cultivated a feminine equivalent to the masculine performance of Pollock, and in doing so looked to subvert its phallocentric mythology. Indeed, fiercely competitive with her male counterparts, Kusama’s work during the early 1960s would itself prove highly innovative and influential for a host of male contemporaries. Following the landmark Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show at Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1963 in which Kusama covered an entire room in repeated boat motifs, Andy Warhol would conceive his immersive Brillo Boxes environment for the Stable Gallery show of 1964. Two years earlier, Kusama’s sewn Accumulation Sculptures would have a huge impact on Claes Oldenburg, who, having seen Kusama’s debut exhibition of Accumulation No. 1 and No. 2 at the Green Gallery in June 1962, would go on to debut his own soft-sculpture to international acclaim the following September. That she failed to gain the same recognition from critics and gallerists as her male contemporaries during the 1960s would cause Kusama a great deal of irritation, anxiety, and frustration. Today, Kusama is considered one of the most influential and popular artists of her time, with works such as the present Infinity Nets (OQ4) proving that her critical acclaim was long overdue and well deserved.



This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Yayoi Kusama Studio.