Painted amidst a period of major retrospectives cementing Yayoi Kusama’s unique place within the context of the contemporary art canon in Japan and New York in the 90’s, Infinity Nets exemplifies the Japanese artist’s most iconic motif, in which she transposes her life-long psychosis on canvas in the form of an undulating web of interconnected lines. A mesmerising body of works she has frequently revisited over a period of fifty years under the concept of self-obliteration, the Infinity Nets series is a cornerstone of the artist’s formal explorations and overall vision, setting the foundations for her most significant works and installations.

Kusama first started her Infinity Nets series in New York in 1958 in the form of a web of white lines and loops over a monochromatic white background. The series started as the artist’s approximation of her hallucinations suffered since childhood, where she would envision her entire surroundings covered in undulating patterns. During such moments of psychological unrest, Kusama described finding herself engulfed by rhythmic nets of dots and semicircles, and feeling compelled to replicate the structure’s overwhelming cellular formations on material support. The kaleidoscopic framework enveloping her body would then extend from her thoughts and onto the canvas. ‘As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity,’ the artist declared, ‘I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room’ (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in Marie Laurberg, ‘Deep Surfaces’, Yayoi Kusama In Infinity, Humblebaek, 2015, p. 12). It was this endless reach and repetition of this motif which sparked Kusama’s fixation on the concept of self-obliteration – to lose herself and subsume her individual ego within the ‘infinite,’ in turn spurring the obsessive production of Infinity Nets paintings.

With a pitch black rhythmic lattice rendered over a ruby red background, the present painting marks a key point in the evolution of Kusama’s painting over three decades towards incorporating more colour and organic imagery. As exemplified by Infinity Nets, uneven impasto present in earlier net paintings shifted to flatter, less visible brushstrokes, conveying an avant-garde graphical approach that further highlighted her obsession with the theme of interconnectedness, and the integration with ones environment through self-obliteration. As with other Infinity Nets painted during this time, the present lot introduces more dynamism and depth through the variation of the sizes and thickness of the lines composing her webs. This results in delicate gradients between two contrasting shades, creating a visual effect of a net afloat on crimson waters, or the topographical ebb and flow of a landscape. This elegant visual effect created through simple repetition of form and colour is also a quality attributed to the artist’s formal training in traditional Japanese Nihonga painting, drawing its viewer into Kusama’s highly personal and immersive, ever-changing psychological environment.

Archetypal of this series, Infinity Nets conveys the inextricable relationship between Kusama’s signature style and the psychotic struggles pervading her own life. In doing so, the work beautifully presents Kusama’s neurosis and epitomises the artist’s compulsive need to self-obliterate through intense, ritualistic repetition.