'My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe.' —Yayoi Kusama 

In its endlessly repeating knots of shimmering silver covering a barely discernible black ground reconfigured by the eye into a vibrating expanse of polka dots, Yayoi Kusama’s Silver-Nets (EOKI) is a particularly dynamic example of the artist’s highly significant Infinity Nets series. Evoking at once the molecular and the cosmic, the expansively infinite and deeply intimate, Kusuma first embarked on her series of vast nets shortly after her move to New York in 1958, when Abstract Expressionism was at its zenith. In her blending of seriality with modes of all-over painting Kusama sought not only to disrupt distinctions between figure and ground, but to obliterate the nature of canvas completely, allowing it to merge with herself, the room and ultimately, the entire universe. 

 

The Artist and the Infinite

 

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,  mirrored environments and Infintiy Rooms that are currently the subject of sell-out exhibitons in London and internationally.  

'Small forms flow into each other, grow and diminish, with an undulating rhythm so deeply tuned to nature that the viewer, as he lets himself become fully aware of the painting, experiences the same serenity and suppressed excitement that he feels in watching changing cloud formations, moving shadows of sun through leaves, water ripples and shadow patterns in the water below.'
—Beatrice Perry, 1960

With the entire surface of the canvas, object or environment animated by these looping and repeating patterns, the overall effect is immerisve and deeply moving, as is particualrly evident in Silver-Nets (EOKI). Suffused with a sense of light and air, the brilliant silver loops expand like a net across the surface of the canvas, creating complex internal rhythms as the eye transitions from the passages of thicker impasto to smoother sections of thinner and lighter paint. Working in acrylics in small, contained gestures, Kusama is able to maintain a speed and focus in her execution of these works that compounds this sense of rhythmic vitality, and is uniquely suited to her working practice. In its combinations of vibrant silver and intricate patterning, the whole surface is transformed to a shimmering, gently undulating expanse that radically disrupts spatial boundaries and our sense of orientation within it. 

 

As her 1967 avant-garde film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration explores more broadly, this obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition and the infinite lies at the absolute heart of the artist's multi-disciplinary commitment to an aesthetics of immersion. Finding formal expression in endless variations of dots, whorls, and nets, Kusama forged a path to self-obliteration.

 

Yayoi Kusama, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, 1967

 

Crossing the Pacific 

 

The employment of dots in the service of self-obliteration can be traced across Kusama’s entire oeuvre to her earliest experiences with obsessional neurosis and hallucinations. Growing up on her family’s seed farm in the Matsumoto Prefecture, Kusama recalls a childhood marked by strained family dynamics and hallucinatory visions.

'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.' —Yayoi KusamaStanding amongst the seemingly boundless fields she describes being overcome by the sensation of being swallowed up by this expansive sea of flowers. For the young Kusama, the repetitive action of painting – of transcribing and replicating these visions - allievated this oppressive sensation and she produced innumerable ‘ink paintings featuring accumulations of tiny dots and pen drawings of endless and unbroken chains of graded celluar forms or peculiar structures that resembled magnified sections of plant stalks’.ⁱ

  

Travelling to the United States from Japan to pursue a career as an artist in 1958, this childhood obsession would expand into a robust aesthetic language as she gazed down from the aeroplane on the wide expanse of the Pacifc Ocean as she approached America for the first time. Finding in the softly undulating surface of the water a visual touchstone for her visions, this oceanic infintidue would provide the conceptual basis for the series, her first Infintiy Net painting appropriately titled Pacific Ocean completed shortly after her arrival in New York. Significantly, Kusama chose to show five large white Infinity Net canvases at her breakthorugh exhibition at the artist-run Brata Gallery in 1959, which prompted artist-critic Donald Judd to applaud the originality of her concept and the strength of its execution. In a careful and precise description of the ‘small dense arcs’  maintaining the surface of these works, Judd captured the sense of rhythmic variation that animates the whole series as ‘small curves coalesce into longer arcs, swell or shift slightly, or form amorphous patterns’.ⁱⁱ

 

‘A Closer look at Yayoi Kusama. No. F, 1959’, from the series ‘In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019

  

Exeucted in 1959 during these first months in New York, No. F, 1959 now resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, underscoring the exceptional aesthetic lineage of the present work. Fully immersive and absorbing, the serene silver expanse cast across the canvas in Kusama’s Silver-Nets (EOKI) traverses the full breadth of the artist’s career, its infinite loops brining her earliest white phallic soft-sculpture accumulations with her most recent Infinity Rooms.  Executed in 2011, in the mature period of Kusama’s career as her reputation as one of the most successful and internationally recognised living artists was crystalising, the present work deftly combines the obsessional, repetitive, and immersive qualities for which Yayoi Kusama is most well-known.
 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    With a highly influential oeuvre guided by unparalleled creativity, works by Kusama make part of collections of prestigious museums throughout the world. This includes the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Having been honoured with extensive solo exhibitions throughout her career, including a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, Kusama continues to affirm her position as a leading contemporary artist with an upcoming retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin (September 2020, postponed to March 2021); as well as upcoming exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2020, to be rescheduled); the New York Botanical Garden (2020, postponed to 2021); and the Tate Modern, London (Spring 2021 – Spring 2022).

 

Examples from the esteemed handful of early 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. A striking testament to the alluring and disorienting spatial complexity that has defined Kusama’s work for decades, Silver-Nets (EOKI) offers a treasured glimpse of the conceptual and creative origins of one of the most iconic figures of contemporary art.

 

ⁱ Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London, 2013, n.p. 
ⁱⁱ Donald Judd, ‘Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month – Yayoi Kusama’, ARTNews, 58, no. 6 (October 1959), p. 17.