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Lot Essay
“I guess I came under a spell. 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. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.” Yayoi Kusama (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, 2015, pp. 11)
The extraordinary, large-scale Infinity Nets (RDUEL) presents a seemingly limitless field of cadmium red brushstrokes against a dark ground. A prime example from Yayoi Kusama’s most famed body of work, her Infinity Net paintings, the painting provides a didactic display of draughtsmanship. Each painterly addition is a repeated iteration of a single elegant gesture, a discrete flip of Kusama’s wrist articulated as an arc of pigment. Her use of intense cadmium red in the present work is a nod to her early relationship with the critic turned artist Donald Judd, who frequently used the same color of paint in his early sculptural works. Both obsessive and meditative, the work is an endogenous elaboration of the artist’s process wherein Kusama’s technical facility and extraordinary physical stamina elevate the work.
Kusama initiated her Infinity Nets soon after her arrival in New York, showing them first at Nova Gallery in June 1959, then at Brata Gallery later that year. The series was a revelation to the New York art world, winning critical acclaim. Donald Judd compared the works to Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, while Stuart Preston lauded: “the patience that has gone into the confection of texture is astonishing and the concentrated pattern titillates the eye” (S. Preston, quoted in Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, London, 2012, pg. 53). Kusama synthesizes both Eastern and Western styles in the series, challenging the machismo and ecstatic gesture in Abstract Expressionism then current in New York with a self-consciously feminine, exhaustive gesture. Energy diffuses like waves across the work’s expanse, pushing the painting to the limits of spatial extent in a scale which overwhelms even the largest New York School canvases.
While highly attuned to Western artistic developments, Kusama received a traditional Japanese artistic education focused on Nihonga painting. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in central Japan, Kusama devoted herself to art from a very young age, finding refuge from familial and wartime tribulations in her self-taught creative inventions. She was able to enroll in Kyoto Municipal Upper Secondary School to master the water-soluble techniques necessary to create traditional Japanese paintings. Kusama rapidly attained success in Japan, exhibiting a number of shows in Tokyo, but felt compelled to emigrate to New York: “Staying in Japan was out of the question. My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice…For art like mine—art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die—this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, a wider world” (Y. Kusama, quoted in op. cit, pg. 171).
Kusama’s decades of prolific production emerge from her desire for refuge from the psychological symptoms she constantly suffered from since childhood, namely hallucinosis, and her Infinity Nets provide her with a strong visual anchor from which she is able to out-will her hallucinations. Viewing the nets as a form of protection, Kusama describes that while painting these works, “I would cover the canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, or the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand toward infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. I woke one morning and found the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled onto and into the skin of my hands” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, Louisiana Museum of Art, 2015, pp. 11-12.). The present work accords even more vividly with her first and most significant childhood hallucination, where she witnessed “eternal time and absolute space” as her entire universe became saturated with deep red flowers. In Infinity Nets (RDUEL) Kusama then reenacts this early traumatic experience in the deep red ground, resisting the obliterative effects of the hallucination via the lattice of red nets which she covers across the canvas. In this subtle development from her earlier Infinity Nets, Kusama expands the reach and effect of the series, successfully capturing both the hallucinatory and the palliative on a single canvas.
Infinity Nets (RDUEL) encapsulates Kusama’s most important motif in her iconic personal vocabulary of images which have remained singular across her decades-long career. A seismograph for the zeitgeist, Kusama has remained at the avant-garde, constantly revisiting and advancing concepts first originated as expressions of her inner self while amid the competitive and hectic artistic space of New York. Infinity Nets function as Kusama’s form of resistance, constructing an infinity of space within an extraordinary visual field to allow for her “self-obliteration.”
The extraordinary, large-scale Infinity Nets (RDUEL) presents a seemingly limitless field of cadmium red brushstrokes against a dark ground. A prime example from Yayoi Kusama’s most famed body of work, her Infinity Net paintings, the painting provides a didactic display of draughtsmanship. Each painterly addition is a repeated iteration of a single elegant gesture, a discrete flip of Kusama’s wrist articulated as an arc of pigment. Her use of intense cadmium red in the present work is a nod to her early relationship with the critic turned artist Donald Judd, who frequently used the same color of paint in his early sculptural works. Both obsessive and meditative, the work is an endogenous elaboration of the artist’s process wherein Kusama’s technical facility and extraordinary physical stamina elevate the work.
Kusama initiated her Infinity Nets soon after her arrival in New York, showing them first at Nova Gallery in June 1959, then at Brata Gallery later that year. The series was a revelation to the New York art world, winning critical acclaim. Donald Judd compared the works to Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, while Stuart Preston lauded: “the patience that has gone into the confection of texture is astonishing and the concentrated pattern titillates the eye” (S. Preston, quoted in Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern, London, 2012, pg. 53). Kusama synthesizes both Eastern and Western styles in the series, challenging the machismo and ecstatic gesture in Abstract Expressionism then current in New York with a self-consciously feminine, exhaustive gesture. Energy diffuses like waves across the work’s expanse, pushing the painting to the limits of spatial extent in a scale which overwhelms even the largest New York School canvases.
While highly attuned to Western artistic developments, Kusama received a traditional Japanese artistic education focused on Nihonga painting. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in central Japan, Kusama devoted herself to art from a very young age, finding refuge from familial and wartime tribulations in her self-taught creative inventions. She was able to enroll in Kyoto Municipal Upper Secondary School to master the water-soluble techniques necessary to create traditional Japanese paintings. Kusama rapidly attained success in Japan, exhibiting a number of shows in Tokyo, but felt compelled to emigrate to New York: “Staying in Japan was out of the question. My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice…For art like mine—art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die—this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, a wider world” (Y. Kusama, quoted in op. cit, pg. 171).
Kusama’s decades of prolific production emerge from her desire for refuge from the psychological symptoms she constantly suffered from since childhood, namely hallucinosis, and her Infinity Nets provide her with a strong visual anchor from which she is able to out-will her hallucinations. Viewing the nets as a form of protection, Kusama describes that while painting these works, “I would cover the canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, or the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand toward infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. I woke one morning and found the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled onto and into the skin of my hands” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, Louisiana Museum of Art, 2015, pp. 11-12.). The present work accords even more vividly with her first and most significant childhood hallucination, where she witnessed “eternal time and absolute space” as her entire universe became saturated with deep red flowers. In Infinity Nets (RDUEL) Kusama then reenacts this early traumatic experience in the deep red ground, resisting the obliterative effects of the hallucination via the lattice of red nets which she covers across the canvas. In this subtle development from her earlier Infinity Nets, Kusama expands the reach and effect of the series, successfully capturing both the hallucinatory and the palliative on a single canvas.
Infinity Nets (RDUEL) encapsulates Kusama’s most important motif in her iconic personal vocabulary of images which have remained singular across her decades-long career. A seismograph for the zeitgeist, Kusama has remained at the avant-garde, constantly revisiting and advancing concepts first originated as expressions of her inner self while amid the competitive and hectic artistic space of New York. Infinity Nets function as Kusama’s form of resistance, constructing an infinity of space within an extraordinary visual field to allow for her “self-obliteration.”