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Lot Essay
‘A polka dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity’ (Y. Kusama, Manhattan Jisatsu Misui Joshuhan (Manhattan Suicide Addict), Tokyo 1984, p. 124).
Infinity Nets PQR, 2007, is a mesmeric example from Yayoi Kusama’s ongoing Infinity Nets series that she began at the start of her career in the late 1950s. Spanning one and a half meters, this both delicate and monumental work appears from a distance almost monochromatic, but on closer inspection the intricacy of the surface becomes clear. Small arched semi-circles of vivid red almost completely cover the surface of the canvas and appear to extend beyond the picture plane, enhancing the works potential to expand ad infinitum. The meticulous and undulating swirls present themselves with a hypnotic vitality. The vivid intensity of the bright red paint replicates her painstaking application of paint and begins to pulsate with energy, causing ones perception of figure and ground to fluctuate. Enveloping the viewer in a shimmering web, Kusama’s uncompromising vision can be seen in rhythmic formations, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery with every twist and turn of the brush.
Speaking of her net paintings, Kusama describes them as the maturation of a long-anticipated desire to release a semi-cosmic vision of nature. They are the visualisations of powerful hallucinations that the artist has endured since her childhood during which her visual field is obscured by an overly of nets and dots. The nets appear as screens reducing her view of what lies beyond to specks or in Kusama’s terms, dots. She recalls, ‘the room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and absolute space. This was not an illusion but a reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). These hallucinations led her to paint compulsively for hours on end, sometimes for up to forty or fifty hours without eating or sleeping. Infinity Nets I. N. PQR displays the process of its construction, making evident the meticulous care with which it was made, by repeated iterations of a single, simple gesture. There is an incessant quality in this gesture that is both obsessive and meditative, reflecting the intensity of the work’s inception. With its dizzying monotony and labour intensive intricacy, the making of her obsessive work is both an act of self-obliteration and one of artistic transubstantiation. The physical self is erased only to be re-asserted in the artist’s signature patterns. As Kusama explained, ‘By obliterating one's individual self, one returns to the infinite universe’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in G. Turner, ‘Yayoi Kusama’, in Bomb, no. 66, Winter 1999).
Infinity Nets PQR, 2007, is a mesmeric example from Yayoi Kusama’s ongoing Infinity Nets series that she began at the start of her career in the late 1950s. Spanning one and a half meters, this both delicate and monumental work appears from a distance almost monochromatic, but on closer inspection the intricacy of the surface becomes clear. Small arched semi-circles of vivid red almost completely cover the surface of the canvas and appear to extend beyond the picture plane, enhancing the works potential to expand ad infinitum. The meticulous and undulating swirls present themselves with a hypnotic vitality. The vivid intensity of the bright red paint replicates her painstaking application of paint and begins to pulsate with energy, causing ones perception of figure and ground to fluctuate. Enveloping the viewer in a shimmering web, Kusama’s uncompromising vision can be seen in rhythmic formations, sending the eye on a frenetic journey of discovery with every twist and turn of the brush.
Speaking of her net paintings, Kusama describes them as the maturation of a long-anticipated desire to release a semi-cosmic vision of nature. They are the visualisations of powerful hallucinations that the artist has endured since her childhood during which her visual field is obscured by an overly of nets and dots. The nets appear as screens reducing her view of what lies beyond to specks or in Kusama’s terms, dots. She recalls, ‘the room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns], my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and absolute space. This was not an illusion but a reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 36). These hallucinations led her to paint compulsively for hours on end, sometimes for up to forty or fifty hours without eating or sleeping. Infinity Nets I. N. PQR displays the process of its construction, making evident the meticulous care with which it was made, by repeated iterations of a single, simple gesture. There is an incessant quality in this gesture that is both obsessive and meditative, reflecting the intensity of the work’s inception. With its dizzying monotony and labour intensive intricacy, the making of her obsessive work is both an act of self-obliteration and one of artistic transubstantiation. The physical self is erased only to be re-asserted in the artist’s signature patterns. As Kusama explained, ‘By obliterating one's individual self, one returns to the infinite universe’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in G. Turner, ‘Yayoi Kusama’, in Bomb, no. 66, Winter 1999).