Nets

With its hypnotic web-like surface, the present work is a captivating example of Yayoi Kusama’s celebrated Infnity Nets. First conceived in the 1960s upon the artist’s arrival in New York, it was this series of works, more than any other, that precipitated her meteoric rise to international acclaim. Though initially born as an elegant riposte to the painterly gesturalism that dominated the New York art scene at that time, the cosmic sublimity of these mesmeric compositions positioned Kusama as heir to the Abstract Expressionist practices of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. In the subtle, shifting surfaces of the Infnity Nets, Kusama evokes a transcendental space that lies beyond the limits of the human imagination. Alternately suggesting the vastness of the cosmos and the infinitesimal forms of cells or atoms, the complex matrix of dots stands as the ultimate cipher for the incomprehensible dimensions of infinity. Standing among the most important aspects her entire oeuvre, Kusama’s all-over patterns allowed her to channel the hallucinatory visions she suffered from early childhood onwards. She described being struck by haunting apparitions of proliferating dots, nets and flowers that overwhelmed her entire being. ‘My room, my body, the entire universe was filled with [patterns]’, she recalls; ‘my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. This was not an illusion but reality’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman and U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, New York 2000, p. 36).