Evoking a cosmic sense of boundlessness, Nets in the Night (TPXZZOT) radiates as a celestial marvel from Yayoi Kusama’s iconic series. This vast canvas employs the artist’s signature visual idiom of endlessly repeating dots and is exemplary of the Infinity Nets in its expansive scale, impasto brushwork, and varying density of knots. At the same time, however, the painting is distinguished from this body of work by its subdued palette and considered marks. While many of the Infinity Nets feature vibrant colors and looser brushwork, Nets in the Night features a shimmering expanse of velvety black circles which have been painstakingly painted in a dense mesh across a moon-white ground. It transforms the confines of the square canvas into an exercise in obliteration: pulsating rhythms draw in the viewer’s gaze, which traces fugitive connections between one patch of darkness to another. Kusama has infused the present work with a compelling vitality, reflecting her persistent preoccupation with accumulation, seriality, and the infinite—an ethos that defines her artistic practice.

“My net paintings were very large canvases without composition—without beginning, end or center. The entire canvas would be occupied by a monochromatic net. This endless repetition causes a kind of dizzying, empty, hypnotic feeling.”
—Yayoi Kusama

In Nets in the Night, the artist’s notion of “infinity” is extended beyond a mere association with the repetition of visual forms to take on a more directly cosmological significance. The surface evokes an astronomical panorama of a radiant night sky ablaze with stars, each dot gleaming through Kusama’s loops like a distant ray in a vast cosmic expanse. Becoming celestial bodies that form twinkling constellations, these hints of light invite contemplation of our place within the cosmos. “My desire [with the Infinity Nets] was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots—an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net,” Kusama elucidated. “How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe?”ⁱ Both pictorially and conceptually, Nets in the Night is a manifestation of the artist’s pursuit to express the expansiveness of the universe.

 

The Infinity Nets constitute the artist’s most ambitious and significant engagement with the medium of painting, one which has persisted since the late 1950s. Travelling to the United States from Japan to pursue a career as an artist in 1957, Kusama gazed out of the airplane window the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, captivated by the softly undulating surface of the water. This oceanic infinitude would provide the conceptual basis for the series, which she began not long after her arrival in New York. Within the context of post-war American abstraction, these intricate networks of painted loops established an important bridge between the gestural energies of Abstract Expressionism and the formal economy of Minimalism. Over the next six decades, Kusama continuously revisited and refined the Infinity Nets, experimenting with different color palettes, brushwork techniques, and scales; with time, the execution of the series became a serial act itself. Each painting, such as Nets in the Night, therefore constitutes a unique exploration of texture, rhythm, and space. This tension between infinity and individuality lies at the heart of Kusama’s oeuvre, and the personal significance of these works was underscored by her decision to name her autobiography Infinity Net (2023).

 

Coalescing the obsessional, repetitive, and immersive qualities for which she is best known, the visual language of Nets in the Night constitutes a distillation of the main themes of her life and career. Indeed, the densely dotted “infinity net” motif is one that is deeply rooted in the artist’s own biography. Growing up on her family’s seed farm in the mountain town of Matsumoto in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, the young Kusama began to experience the profound visual and auditory hallucinations that continue to guide discussions of her practice. Against the backdrop of a strained childhood marked by trauma and violence, Kusama has poignantly recounted these early episodes when “after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up... I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space.”ⁱⁱ These highly personal dot patterns not only characterize her Infinity Net canvases, but also thread together much of her output, from her soft sculptural “accumulations” and provocative 1960s Happenings, to her pumpkin images and Infinity Rooms.

“With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe.”
—Yayoi Kusama

Oscillating between the microbial and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite, the expanse of Nets in the Night is emblematic of Kusama’s landmark series and cornerstone of her practice. The cosmological, all-over composition of the painting may be interpreted as a reference to exterior world—specifically, the night sky and universe that engulfs us—but simultaneously reflects the artist's interiority. Its self-obliterating loops and dots, an enduring reference point in her artistic journey, are a striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s corpus for decades. In this way, the work emphasizes the close conceptual connections between her painting practice and her installation and performance work, positioning it at the center of her seventy-year career. 

 

ⁱ Kusama, quoted in Kusama, Infinity Net, n.p.

ⁱⁱ Yayoi Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2011, p. 23.