Untitled

The accumulation of countless minute gestures coalesces to form a shimmering field of color in Yayoi Kusama’s Untitled—a remarkably early example of the iconic forms that would become her Infinity Nets. The result of her obsessive process that often means she paints for forty or even fifty hours at a time, these works are Kusama’s most intimate body of work, alive with the touch of the artist’s hand. The Infinity Nets were cultivated during her arrival in New York in the late 1950s and early 60s, with her 1959 exhibition at the Brata Gallery often acknowledged as a milestone in their development. Already at this early date of 1953—four years before she left Japan for the U.S.—the formal structure of the Infinity Nets has been realized in Untitled, a jewel-like arrangement in shimmering watercolor and gouache. Evoking the boundless expanse of an unknowable universe, this painting embodies the spiritual dimension that underlies this extraordinary body of work. Set off by a central iridescent green under layer, the profusion of brightly glowing forms are rendered with self-assured delicatesse, where Kusama’s obsessive brushwork effortlessly constructs an undulating field that crests and falls in soft, billowing waves.

Untitled is a consummate demonstration of Kusama’s inexhaustible process, where she has covered the entire surface of the painted sheet with a scrim of shimmering, jewel-like forms. Following the compositional structure of the Infinity Net series, Kusama begins by brushing on a single color that serves as the painting’s ground. Here, Kusama has chosen an emerald green that she overlays with a proliferation of brightly-colored cells ranging from red to orange and yellowish green. Lavishly painted in rich, warm tones, these tiny strokes of the brush evoke the shimmering of autumn leaves or the swelling of ocean coral. What from a distance may appear to be a softly modulated field gradually reveals itself to be an intricate, mesmerizing array of tiny, individual motifs that are clustered together in organic grouplets. Set against the background of iridescent green, Kusama’s infinite field of tiny reddish circles swells and pulses—the circular rings expanding and contracting in size as they proliferate across the painting to produce the illusion of undulating waves.

Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings are deeply personal, relating to the artist’s fundamental need to express her unique inner vision. Growing up in the mountainous region of Nagano, Japan, Kusama was largely shielded from the destructive violence of World War II, and yet she suffered from a traumatic childhood, brought on by her abusive mother and philandering father. As a young child at the age of 10, Kusama began to experience peculiar hallucinations, seeing a scrim of repeating patterns and dots wherever she looked. “One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern. I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated … This was not an illusion but reality itself” (Y. Kusama, quoted in a press release for Flower Obsession, shown at the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial, Melbourne, in 2017).

Even at that young age, Kusama learned to sublimate her anxiety by the process of drawing. She soon discovered that art could become a palliative form of therapy, which she later called “art-medicine.” By drawing repetitive patterns, she was able to obliterate the all-consuming thoughts that plagued her from an early age. Kusama would later describe this process “self-obliteration.”

The Infinity Nets were the first paintings that Kusama made upon her arrival in New York in 1958. These monochromatic paintings, rendered in varying shades of white where tiny circular strokes amassed by the hundreds, if not thousands, truly evoked the “infinity of eternal time” that Kusama herself described. They also proved to be a fresh rejoinder to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist paintings of their day. Coming as they did toward the end of the 1950s, the Infinity Nets anticipated a new era of restrained elegance that would be characterized by Minimalism. In October of 1959, Kusama’s Infinity Nets were exhibited at the Brata Gallery, and were praised by influential critics like Dore Ashton and Lucy Lippard, and fellow artists Donald Judd and Frank Stella, who were both early collectors of her work.

Between 1951 and 1957, Kusama focused exclusively on works on paper, creating intricate abstractions in pastel, gouache, watercolor and ink that demonstrated a growing finesse. “It is noteworthy that she experimented in these drawings and watercolors with motifs clearly prototypical of those she would develop in the net/dot paintings of her early years in New York,” the curator Akira Tatehata has written. “These images--incorporating scattered dots and intricate, fluctuating nets--are the products of obsessive repetition that seems to proliferate beyond all bounds” (A. Tatehata, “Yayoi Kusama as Autonomous Surrealist,” Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998, p. 67).

Kusama famously burned thousands of these early drawings along the banks of the Susuki River that flowed behind her family home just before her departure to the U.S. in 1957. Whatever extant works on paper that survived are presumably those that she carried in suitcases with her on the plane from Tokyo to Seattle in November of 1957. “Those pieces I saved were excellent pieces that already showed some signs of dots and infinity nets,” Kusama described, in an interview from 1999. “Those small works reflect the great depth of my inner heart” (Y. Kusama, quoted in G. Turner, “Yayoi Kusama” in Bomb, no. 66, Winter 1999).

Now 90, Yayoi Kusama continues to paint, at times waking at 3 a.m. to begin her meticulous and time-consuming practice. She works uninterrupted for hours at a time, as if in a trance or spell. Her Infinity Nets are the result of such determination and focus, and remain the therapy that soothes her overactive mind. “I’m old now, but I am still going to create more work and better work. More than I have in the past,” she said. “My mind is full of paintings” (Y. Kusama, quoted in A. Fifield, “How Yayoi Kusama Channels Mental Illness into Art,” Washington Post, February 15, 2017).