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Lot Essay
Painted in 2014, and acquired by the present owner the following year, Yayoi Kusama’s My Life casts a dazzling, lustrous web of purple across a monumental canvas. Peering through this shimmering surface are countless bright, coral-pink eyes, framed by a black rectangle whose flame-like edges vibrate with electric intensity. My Life forms part of Kusama’s ongoing series My Eternal Soul, which she began in 2009. With their lace-like patterning composed of eyes, cells, and other organic forms, these works possess a profound sense of autobiography. Like her iconic Infinity Nets, the series suggests an infinite sublime as the repetitive forms reach for an endless beyond, evoking the hallucinations that Kusama has experienced since childhood. ‘One day,’ she remembered, ‘looking at a red flower-patterned tablecloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts. The room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, 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 reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman et al. (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, pp. 35-36). The present work’s title pays homage to Kusama’s vision, and imbues the canvas with a sense of biographical truth.
Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama took a leap of faith and moved to New York City at the age of twenty-nine with dreams of making a name for herself in the city’s nascent avant-garde art scene. Her impact on the international art world was explosive: the cosmic beauty of the Infinity Nets positioned the artist as heir to her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Avoiding action painting, Kusama instead developed a hyper-focused, rhythmic style of brushwork. With their self-contained repetition, the Infinity Nets heralded the Minimalist developments that would later sweep the art world. Yet although significant to a changing post-war art, ultimately Kusama’s practice defies easy categorisation. At the root of her work is an idiosyncratic and intensely personal vision, reinforced here in the title of the present work. As Kusama 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 always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in ibid., p. 103).
For the artist, the process of creating the My Eternal Soul works is frantic and feverish, and these paintings function as the physical manifestations of her internal psyche. With its myriad eyes blinking through radiant layers of pigment, My Life scintillates with texture and feeling. Plunging its viewer into hypnotic repetitions, My Life produces a sense of the infinite which extends far beyond the confines of the canvas. The enveloping effect of the works mirrors the artist’s own internal landscape: to lose oneself in its meditative splendour is to enter Kusama’s world.
Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama took a leap of faith and moved to New York City at the age of twenty-nine with dreams of making a name for herself in the city’s nascent avant-garde art scene. Her impact on the international art world was explosive: the cosmic beauty of the Infinity Nets positioned the artist as heir to her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Avoiding action painting, Kusama instead developed a hyper-focused, rhythmic style of brushwork. With their self-contained repetition, the Infinity Nets heralded the Minimalist developments that would later sweep the art world. Yet although significant to a changing post-war art, ultimately Kusama’s practice defies easy categorisation. At the root of her work is an idiosyncratic and intensely personal vision, reinforced here in the title of the present work. As Kusama 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 always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in ibid., p. 103).
For the artist, the process of creating the My Eternal Soul works is frantic and feverish, and these paintings function as the physical manifestations of her internal psyche. With its myriad eyes blinking through radiant layers of pigment, My Life scintillates with texture and feeling. Plunging its viewer into hypnotic repetitions, My Life produces a sense of the infinite which extends far beyond the confines of the canvas. The enveloping effect of the works mirrors the artist’s own internal landscape: to lose oneself in its meditative splendour is to enter Kusama’s world.