“I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair, I’ve been doing it physically – it’s hard labour – throughout my life.”
YAYOI KUSAMA

In Infinity Nets OPQR, 2007, an intensely worked illusion fills the entirety of the canvas in a pure and soft palette of whites and grays. The surface collides and collapses as the biomorphic forms pulse inward and outward, extending beyond the boundaries of the composition. Kusama forged her way through the New York art scene in the 1950s with her drive to cover vast canvases with steady, yet insistent tracts of small, thickly painted loops. The present lot, while recently conceived, is a mere window into a six decade long obsession with the motif. No. F, 1959, at the Museum of Modern Art, created nearly five decades earlier, contains the same supple color palette, as well as isotropic loops that fill the canvas. Kusama has rendered infinity, something limitless and unbounded, within the framework of a readymade canvas. However, Infinity Nets OPQR, 2007, is no object, but a living and breathing physical embodiment of both “infinity” and “abstraction,” as if the philosophical queries are performing before us.

The fine mesh of circular patterns across the canvas offers a direct and sentient encounter with the surface. Nearly a decade before Minimalism’s command, Kusama was already creating an environment that necessitated the spectator’s participation in order to diminish the distinction between art and life. By repeating this single motif, Kusama released painting from the canvas, as the loops dance beyond the overturned edges of the frame. In the present lot, the waves are naturalistic as they arc in and out of the deep waters, leaving variations in the surface as light bounces in and off the creases left in their wake. Thin layers of darker grays are applied to suggest depth, furthering the illusion of endlessly recurring waves. There is something nurturing in the repetitive and soft canvas. There are vast meanings in the surface of the present lot, just as there is an infinite variety of meanings in all things – a view that has remained unchanged since Kusama began painting the Infinity Nets at the age of thirteen.