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Lot Essay
“…there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings…are deservedly classics of global stature”—Holland Cotter, New York Times, July 13, 2012
Yayoi Kusama’s Early Spring is an example of the artist’s Infinity Nets series of paintings which contain the iconic motif that has been her pre-occupation for over 50 years. The carefully painted circles, rendered in a palette of verdant green, recalls the lush green foliage that heralds on the onset of spring. These corpuscle shaped objects have been the central motif in the artist’s work since she first arrived in the United States as a young woman, yet far from becoming staid she has spent her career constantly evolving and investigating their aesthetic possibilities and keeping them as fresh as they were when they first appeared in the early 1960s.
In Early Spring, Kusama paints hundreds of small circles that jostle together across the surface of the canvas. Each one is unique, a distinctive article that exists in its own right, yet at the same time reacts to its immediate environment infusing the composition with an almost palpable sense of energy. The difference in chromatic intensity between the individual pieces sets up a rippling effect as the raking light appears to cast a shadow over the undulating surface. Just like Gustav Klimt’s adroit paintings of the dense foliage of his native Austrian countryside, Kusama imbues Early Spring with a distinct sense of animation.
Kusama traces the roots of her celebrated style back to her childhood, when she first noticed the signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder and began experiencing hallucinations. Starting with the onset of her illness at age 10, she created many works over the following years, demonstrating the fanatical work ethic that she would continue to display as an adult. She was also inspired at this time to transcribe her startling visions in her art. As Kusama recalled, “when I was a child, one day I was walking in the field, then all of a sudden, the sky became bright over the mountains, and I saw clearly the very image I was about to paint appear in the sky. I also saw violets which I was painting multiply to cover the doors, windows and even my body….I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas. It was hallucination only the mentally ill can experience” (Y. Kusama, quoted in “Damien Hirst Questions Yayoi Kusama, Across the Water, May, 1998,” Kusama: Now, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1998, p. 15).
Kusama’s remarkable career has been distinguished by both its breadth and longevity. With her Infintiy Nets, she departed from Abstract Expressionism and created a body of work that proved prophetic for many of her contemporaries. While her feverish application of paint to the canvas and interest in mental states clearly has its roots in Abstract Expressionism, Kusama’s strokes are small, obsessive and repetitive rather than expansive, bold and passionate, and her repetition and orientation toward process invites comparison with Minimalists Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Kusama also inspired artists who belonged to the Post-Minimalist movement, such as Eva Hesse, as she provided a more sensual and organic repetition that departed from the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism, and her painstaking development of her surfaces can be likened to the work of Vija Celmins. Still artistically active, Yayoi Kusama has been the subject of a number recent museum retrospectives including the critically acclaimed 2012 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In his review of the exhibition, Holland Cotter of the New York Times summed up her career thus, “there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings…are deservedly classics of global stature” (H. Cotter, “Vivid Hallucinations From a Fragile Life: Yayoi Kusama at Whitney Museum of American Art,” New York Times, July 13, 2012 via www.nytimes.com [accessed January 27, 2016]).
Yayoi Kusama’s Early Spring is an example of the artist’s Infinity Nets series of paintings which contain the iconic motif that has been her pre-occupation for over 50 years. The carefully painted circles, rendered in a palette of verdant green, recalls the lush green foliage that heralds on the onset of spring. These corpuscle shaped objects have been the central motif in the artist’s work since she first arrived in the United States as a young woman, yet far from becoming staid she has spent her career constantly evolving and investigating their aesthetic possibilities and keeping them as fresh as they were when they first appeared in the early 1960s.
In Early Spring, Kusama paints hundreds of small circles that jostle together across the surface of the canvas. Each one is unique, a distinctive article that exists in its own right, yet at the same time reacts to its immediate environment infusing the composition with an almost palpable sense of energy. The difference in chromatic intensity between the individual pieces sets up a rippling effect as the raking light appears to cast a shadow over the undulating surface. Just like Gustav Klimt’s adroit paintings of the dense foliage of his native Austrian countryside, Kusama imbues Early Spring with a distinct sense of animation.
Kusama traces the roots of her celebrated style back to her childhood, when she first noticed the signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder and began experiencing hallucinations. Starting with the onset of her illness at age 10, she created many works over the following years, demonstrating the fanatical work ethic that she would continue to display as an adult. She was also inspired at this time to transcribe her startling visions in her art. As Kusama recalled, “when I was a child, one day I was walking in the field, then all of a sudden, the sky became bright over the mountains, and I saw clearly the very image I was about to paint appear in the sky. I also saw violets which I was painting multiply to cover the doors, windows and even my body….I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas. It was hallucination only the mentally ill can experience” (Y. Kusama, quoted in “Damien Hirst Questions Yayoi Kusama, Across the Water, May, 1998,” Kusama: Now, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1998, p. 15).
Kusama’s remarkable career has been distinguished by both its breadth and longevity. With her Infintiy Nets, she departed from Abstract Expressionism and created a body of work that proved prophetic for many of her contemporaries. While her feverish application of paint to the canvas and interest in mental states clearly has its roots in Abstract Expressionism, Kusama’s strokes are small, obsessive and repetitive rather than expansive, bold and passionate, and her repetition and orientation toward process invites comparison with Minimalists Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Kusama also inspired artists who belonged to the Post-Minimalist movement, such as Eva Hesse, as she provided a more sensual and organic repetition that departed from the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism, and her painstaking development of her surfaces can be likened to the work of Vija Celmins. Still artistically active, Yayoi Kusama has been the subject of a number recent museum retrospectives including the critically acclaimed 2012 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In his review of the exhibition, Holland Cotter of the New York Times summed up her career thus, “there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings…are deservedly classics of global stature” (H. Cotter, “Vivid Hallucinations From a Fragile Life: Yayoi Kusama at Whitney Museum of American Art,” New York Times, July 13, 2012 via www.nytimes.com [accessed January 27, 2016]).