Yayoi Kusama - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, May 26, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
    Private Collection, Canada
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    It was in 1958, shortly after moving to New York, that Yayoi Kusama would begin her most iconic and enduring series of paintings, the Infinity Nets. Painted in 2014, almost 50 years after the inauguration of the series, Infinity Nets (HOAWD) shows a pure mastery of the painterly idiom that secured Kusama’s unique and groundbreaking contribution to the history of abstract painting. Originating from a powerful challenge to the biased hegemony towards bravado brushwork in a male dominated art world in 1960s America, the Infinity Nets employ a unique conceptual approach. They stem from a personal psychological impulse, and desire to harness the therapeutic and self affirming powers of repetition. Creating a mesmerically shimmering surface of heat and dynamism, Infinity Nets (HOAWD) challenges the relation between background and foreground, as the familiar dots materialise through a reverse process. A vista of golden yellow pigments are overridden and encircled by a web of looping red-orange nets. Combining a sense of randomness and uniformity, Kusama channels aesthetic intuition to find beauty in a peculiarly ordered chaos. Inexplicably organic yet adhering to an unintelligible system of logic that binds micro elements to a wider network, the infinity nets present a visually arresting and philosophically profound metaphor for the bonds of relations that constitute the universe.

    Kusama is a truly original artist who has constantly evaded categorisation through a varied practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, film, literature, performance and installation art. Whilst earlier works created in her native Japan were viewed through a surrealist lens, in 1960s Europe and America she shared group exhibitions with Pop artists and even members of the ZERO movement. Kusama has both responded to and influenced movements whilst ultimately maintaining her unique and revolutionary vision. At her very first solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York, Kusama presented a group of white Infinity Nets, offering her bold challenge to the trends of Abstract Expressionism that dominated the city at the time. Evident still in the present work, Kusama’s creation of a delicate and minimal membrane of kinetic brushwork seeks to overthrow the machismo explosions of paint championed by superstar American painters such as Jackson Pollock. Kusama presents a genuine and considered web of subjectivity that is based on an intuitive understanding and connection between painter and canvas.

    The Infinity Nets also carry great personal importance for Kusama, having started the series at a time of hardship, feeling alienated in a new environment. She has recalled: ‘Day after day I forgot my coldness and hunger by painting’ (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in ‘Kusama Dot Com’, New York Times Style Magazine, 24 February 2008). Most crucially, over the subsequent five decades the Infinity Nets have provided psychological respite and a form of personal therapy to combat the episodes of neurosis and hallucinatory visions she has suffered with since childhood – traumas of growing up in wartime Japan. The artist has recounted: “Unable to sleep, I would get out of bed and paint. […] 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).

    Binding the micro, macro and metaphysical, Infinity Nets simultaneously conjures the microscopic cells that make up all matter, the infinity of an intimately connected universe, and a personal “obsession” that the artist has described as “the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me” (Yayoi Kusama, 'Interview with Gordon Brown (1965)' in Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity, London, 2015, p. 11). Through paintings such as Infinity Nets (HOAWD) Kusama offers a hypnotically captivating metaphor that positions the individual within the wider web of life. Now an enduring moment in art history, they articulate individual subjectivity in an unstable and immeasurable environment: “One polka dot: a single particle among billions” (Yayoi Kusama quoted in, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2011 p.23).

  • Artist Biography

    Yayoi Kusama

    Japanese

    Named "the world's most popular artist" in 2015, it's not hard to see why Yayoi Kusama continues to dazzle contemporary art audiences globally. From her signature polka dots—"fabulous," she calls them—to her mirror-and-light Infinity Rooms, Kusama's multi-dimensional practice of making art elevates the experience of immersion. To neatly pin an artistic movement onto Kusama would be for naught: She melds and transcends the aesthetics and theories of many late twentieth century movements, including Pop Art and Minimalism, without ever taking a singular path.

    As an octogenarian who still lives—somewhat famously—in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo and steadfastly paints in her immaculate studio every day, Kusama honed her punchy cosmic style in New York City in the 1960s. During this period, she staged avant-garde happenings, which eventually thrust her onto the international stage with a series of groundbreaking exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s and the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. She continues to churn out paintings and installations at inspiring speed, exhibiting internationally in nearly every corner of the globe, and maintains a commanding presence on the primary market and at auction.

    View More Works

Property of an Important European Collector

9

Infinity Nets (HOAWD)

2014
titled, signed and dated '"HOAWD INFINITY-NETS" YAYOI KUSAMA 2014' on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
97.2 x 130.2 cm. (38 1/4 x 51 1/4 in.)
Painted in 2014, this work is accompanied by a registration card issued by the Yayoi Kusama Studio.

Estimate
HK$4,500,000 - 6,500,000 
€484,000-699,000
$577,000-833,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

Sandy Ma
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2025

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018