“By obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe.”
—Yayoi Kusama

 

The largest red Infinity Net to come to auction, its entire surface covered in tightly rendered whorls of deep cadmium red that continue across the canvas edge, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) is a strikingly elegant iteration of Yayoi Kusama’s ongoing series. Vibrant and dynamic, the rhythmic exchanges between passages of thicker impasto and smoother sections of thinner paint here charge the large-scale composition with a remarkable vitality. Conjuring images of cosmic infinitude and cellular structure it is at once expansive and inward looking, the square format of the canvas intensifying this sense of pictorial tension and drama as the tightly knotted forms seem to vibrate and react against each other and the barely discernible black ground beneath. Completely immersive, the work deftly captures the almost obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite that best characterises Kusama’s practice, of which the Infinity Nets are especially representative of.  

Infinity and Obliteration

 

Deeply rooted in the artist’s personal history, the endlessly looping and repeating whorls seen here are the key motif reinvented across Kusama’s staggering 70 year career and can be traced across the Infinity Net canvases, her soft sculptures or ‘accumulations’, her provocative 1960s Happenings,  and the Infinity Rooms that are currently the subject of sell-out exhibitions in London and internationally. As a child growing up on her family’s seed farm in Matsumoto, Kusama first experienced the profound visual and auditory hallucinations that continue to ground discussions of her practice and her persistent search for infinity and obliteration in her immersive works. Significantly, the deep red of the present work seems to return the artist to her first and most significant of these visions, vividly recounted by the artist some decades later describing how ‘One day, 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.'ⁱ

 

As Kusama is always keen to emphasise, obliteration is not a negative sensation, but one of being restored to an infinite plenitude. Working on a flat surface rather than at an easel, in the repetitive accumulations of polka dots and knotted whorls Kusama developed both a materialisation of these visions and a therapeutic response to them – a translation of ‘hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me’ into paintings.ⁱⁱ

 

Leaving Japan for New York in 1958 and travelling across the Pacific Ocean by aeroplane for the first time, Kusama was thrilled to discover a reflection of her visions in nature, the rippled surface of the ocean stretched out to infinity beneath her. Anchoring the conceptual basis of the series, her early Infinity Net - appropriately titled Pacific Ocean - was created shortly after her arrival in New York, its white scalloped forms repeated across the five large canvases shown at her breakthrough exhibition presented by the artist-run Brata Gallery the following year. While gallerist Beatrice Perry acknowledged the profound effect of the Infinity Nets’ ‘undulating rhythm so deeply attuned to nature’ in the viewer, artists such as Donald Judd and Frank Stella were also struck by her engagement with ideas of seriality, repetition, and spatiality which dovetailed provocatively with some of Minimalism’s central tenants.

In her commitment to the body and performance however, Kusama radically disrupted Minimalism’s rigid geometries and more starkly cerebral elements, bridging more than any of her contemporaries divides between the more disparate threads of mid-century modernism that combined Pop art, Minimalism, feminist performance art, and the all-over, gestural language established by Abstract Expressionism.

 

A favourite colour in Kusama’s repertoire, the intricate red lattice work of this 2008 work visually recalls some of Kusama’s most iconic works from this earlier period, immediately evoking the red polka dots of her 1965 Infinity Mirror Room-Phali’s Field. Prefiguring her installation art and effectively bringing together her soft sculptures, mirrored environments, and the rich palette of the present work, Infinity Mirror Room-Phali’s Field ‘made actual the implied infinity of [her] drawings and paintings’, a model that clearly still resonated with the artist some 40 years later.ⁱⁱⁱ Dressed entirely in red, in this work Kusama directly identified herself as one of the innumerable polka dots surrounding her, a vivid actualisation and transcendence ‘of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’.^iv

 

Deftly combining the obsessional, repetitive, and immersive qualities for which she is best known, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) is particularly sophisticated and rhythmic example of Kusama’s landmark series and cornerstone of her practice. In her blending of seriality with modes of all-over painting in this manner, Kusama sought not only to disrupt distinctions between figure and ground, but to obliterate the nature of canvas completely, ‘to cover the entire surface, filling out the void.’^iv Examples of Kusama’s vibrant red Infinity Nets are held in renowned permanent collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Harn Museum of Art, Florida. A striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s work for decades, INFINITY-NETS (ZXSSAO) also emphasises the close conceptual connections between the series and her installation and performance work, positioning it at the heart of her 70-year practice.  

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• One of the most prominent and prolific artists working today, Yayoi Kusama’s practice blends painting, installation, sculpture, and performance to powerful effect.

 

• Amongst her most desirable works, examples of Kusama’s celebrated Infinity Nets are held in renowned museum collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other pre-eminent institutions.

 

• In May 2022, an early white Infinity Net was presented for sale by Phillips in New York, securing a new auction record for the artist. The present work is the largest red Infinity Net to have been presented at auction. 

 

ⁱ Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2013, p. 23.

ⁱⁱ Yayoi Kusama, quoted in ‘Yayoi Kusama by Grady T. Turner’, BOMB Magazine, 1 January, 1999, online.   

ⁱⁱⁱ Grady T. Turner, ‘Yayoi Kusama by Grady T. Turner’, BOMB Magazine, 1 January, 1999, online.   

^iv Yayoi Kusama in conversation with Gordon Brown (1964), in Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 103.