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Lot Essay
‘My imagination is beyond what people think. It is infinite. I could paint directly without any design and I never suffered from a shortage of ideas to present the human’s profound presence. This creativity is the big hope to live my life.’ – Yayoi Kusama
Painted in 1982, Yayoi Kusama’s Interminable Nets (Green no. 53) is a hypnotic net of electrifying green lines, a pulsating web on white. Rendered in gleaming acrylic paint, which the artist has used since the early 1980s for its quick-drying properties, Interminable Net (Green no. 53) shimmers with a particular lustre, the subtleties of its contours delicately unfolding across the canvas. The net motif is a signature within the artist’s practice, an image that first came to her during a series of childhood hallucinations and one which she has continuously reincarnated throughout her prolific career. Kusama describes the nets as an ‘endlessly repetitive rhythm…[which] presents a new attempt at painting based on a different ‘light’’ (Y. Kusama quoted in Yayoi Kusama, L. Neri and T. Goto (eds.), New York, 2012, p. 60). This lifelong fascination with infinity and seriality aligns Kusama’s thematic with that of Piero Manzoni, who was deeply invested in developing a new visual vocabulary that looked beyond the formal constraints of representation. Kusama’s own preoccupation, however, lacks the severity of Minimalist and Conceptual art frameworks, instead suggesting a capacious elasticity. In recent years, she has re-imagined her infinite forms in a series of installations which require an expansion into three-dimensional space through haptic and optic experiences. As Kusama herself has said, ‘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 standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman and U. Kultermnn, Yayoi Kusama, New York, 2000, p. 103). Kusama’s desire remains as insatiable and unceasing as infnity itself. In Interminable Net (Green no. 53), this mania is manifested through a loving and all-consuming map of lines, a reach towards the limitless and eternal.
Painted in 1982, Yayoi Kusama’s Interminable Nets (Green no. 53) is a hypnotic net of electrifying green lines, a pulsating web on white. Rendered in gleaming acrylic paint, which the artist has used since the early 1980s for its quick-drying properties, Interminable Net (Green no. 53) shimmers with a particular lustre, the subtleties of its contours delicately unfolding across the canvas. The net motif is a signature within the artist’s practice, an image that first came to her during a series of childhood hallucinations and one which she has continuously reincarnated throughout her prolific career. Kusama describes the nets as an ‘endlessly repetitive rhythm…[which] presents a new attempt at painting based on a different ‘light’’ (Y. Kusama quoted in Yayoi Kusama, L. Neri and T. Goto (eds.), New York, 2012, p. 60). This lifelong fascination with infinity and seriality aligns Kusama’s thematic with that of Piero Manzoni, who was deeply invested in developing a new visual vocabulary that looked beyond the formal constraints of representation. Kusama’s own preoccupation, however, lacks the severity of Minimalist and Conceptual art frameworks, instead suggesting a capacious elasticity. In recent years, she has re-imagined her infinite forms in a series of installations which require an expansion into three-dimensional space through haptic and optic experiences. As Kusama herself has said, ‘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 standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman and U. Kultermnn, Yayoi Kusama, New York, 2000, p. 103). Kusama’s desire remains as insatiable and unceasing as infnity itself. In Interminable Net (Green no. 53), this mania is manifested through a loving and all-consuming map of lines, a reach towards the limitless and eternal.