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Lot Essay
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity-Nets [HSO] is a monumental example from the artist’s iconic series, displaying her unique aptitude for seamlessly melding universal themes with personal experience. Her constellation of white painterly loops and swirls speaks to the vastness of the universe while at the same time being a remarkable record of human endeavor. Speaking about her process, the artist said, “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...” (Y. Kusama, trans. R. McCarthy, Infinity Net: The Autobiography Of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011, pp. 17-18, and p. 20). Giving form to her own internal compulsions on a grand scale, the present work draws the viewer into her immersive visual world.
Kusama’s paintings are the result of meticulous brushwork on a grand scale. Up close, each individual application of paint is visible in minute detail, and the viewer can follow the artist’s path as she loops meticulously and precisely. The opacity of the stroke shifts as the brush relinquishes the paint and becomes thinner before Kusama dips the bristles and starts again. From afar, this compulsive method of application and re-application results in a gentle visual undulation between dark and light, the surface appearing to billow and move like a cloud.
Growing up in World War II-era Japan, Kusama turned to art as a means of building a more expansive worldview. In the 1950s, she traveled to the United States, where she began dialogues with artists like the abstract painter Kenneth Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe. Callahan helped her mount a solo exhibition in Seattle in 1957, and from there the artist moved to New York. It was here that the Infinity Nets first took shape in the form we know today, something that was in stark contrast to the machismo of Abstract Expressionism that dominated the period. Art historian Mignon Nixon asserted 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 the meditative qualities inherent in the production of works like Infinity-Nets [HSO], these canvases become all-encompassing as they both eschew objectification and become deeply emotional experiences at the same time.
The paintings were lauded by influential critics such as Dore Ashton and Lucy Lippard, and admired by fellow artists such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd, both of whom were among the first collectors of her work. Judd praised her debut show, saying: "Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The five…very large paintings in this show are strong, advanced in concept and realized. The effect is both complex and simple" Although he acknowledged Kusama's connections to Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and Barnett Newman, he also praised her work as "thoroughly independent" (D. Judd, quoted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, 2005, p. 2).
Throughout her fifty-year career, Kusama’s work has enjoyed a strong international presence. In addition to representing Japan in both the 1966 and 1993 Venice Biennales, her Infinity Net paintings and installations have been exhibited in numerous museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The National Museum of Modern Art, Toyko, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Museo Centro de Arte, Madrid. In 2012-2013 Kusama was also the subject of a major international retrospective that was organized by Tate Modern, London, which then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Kusama’s paintings are the result of meticulous brushwork on a grand scale. Up close, each individual application of paint is visible in minute detail, and the viewer can follow the artist’s path as she loops meticulously and precisely. The opacity of the stroke shifts as the brush relinquishes the paint and becomes thinner before Kusama dips the bristles and starts again. From afar, this compulsive method of application and re-application results in a gentle visual undulation between dark and light, the surface appearing to billow and move like a cloud.
Growing up in World War II-era Japan, Kusama turned to art as a means of building a more expansive worldview. In the 1950s, she traveled to the United States, where she began dialogues with artists like the abstract painter Kenneth Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe. Callahan helped her mount a solo exhibition in Seattle in 1957, and from there the artist moved to New York. It was here that the Infinity Nets first took shape in the form we know today, something that was in stark contrast to the machismo of Abstract Expressionism that dominated the period. Art historian Mignon Nixon asserted 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 the meditative qualities inherent in the production of works like Infinity-Nets [HSO], these canvases become all-encompassing as they both eschew objectification and become deeply emotional experiences at the same time.
The paintings were lauded by influential critics such as Dore Ashton and Lucy Lippard, and admired by fellow artists such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd, both of whom were among the first collectors of her work. Judd praised her debut show, saying: "Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The five…very large paintings in this show are strong, advanced in concept and realized. The effect is both complex and simple" Although he acknowledged Kusama's connections to Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and Barnett Newman, he also praised her work as "thoroughly independent" (D. Judd, quoted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, 2005, p. 2).
Throughout her fifty-year career, Kusama’s work has enjoyed a strong international presence. In addition to representing Japan in both the 1966 and 1993 Venice Biennales, her Infinity Net paintings and installations have been exhibited in numerous museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The National Museum of Modern Art, Toyko, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Museo Centro de Arte, Madrid. In 2012-2013 Kusama was also the subject of a major international retrospective that was organized by Tate Modern, London, which then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.