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拍品专文
‘The entire canvas would be occupied by monochromatic net. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling. (…) My net grew beyond myself and beyond the canvas 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.’
—YAYOI KUSAMA
As an all-over pattern of golden yellow dots unfurls against a white background, subtle suggestions of form and motion seem to swell and recede across the board like hallucinations: Untitled is a dizzying journey into the infinite. Painted in 1970 at the estate of Dr Maarten Reinink while he was treating the artist, and given afterwards to the psychiatrist – the painting comes with the pallet and paintbrush used by Kusama on the reverse – it is a vivid, fantastical example of Yayoi Kusama’s career-defining ‘infinity net’ paintings. The bright airiness of its gauzy pattern of dots offset against the brilliant burnished gold of the canvas, the work alchemises a feeling of both lightness and weight – but it is also underpinned by an emotional intensity contained within the artist’s obsessive, individualised markings. A feat of remarkable stamina and focus, Kusama labours for hours, meticulously repeating – though not replicating – each dot in order to create the net’s rippling effect; working inches from the work’s surface, the process of painting becomes an all-consuming, almost spiritual experience, the world distilled to one simple form.
The pattern has characterised Kusama’s art from the very beginning; this work was produced in 1970, twenty years after her first dot paintings were exhibited in Japan, and at the end of a decade in which she had thrilled and scandalised the New York art world, but her earliest piece featuring a dot-design was made even earlier, at the age of ten – a drawing of a woman in a kimono, thought to be the artist’s mother, obliterated by a sea of dots. Through her career she has transferred the pattern onto objects, clothing, walls and even human bodies, as her work has migrated across mediums, into performance art, installation and fashion. In some sense, this sense of continuity is of central importance to Kusama’s work; just as in her vision of the flower-pattern, filling ‘the room, my body, the entire universe’, Kusama’s oeuvre seeks to reveal a world structured by one guiding principle, bonding disparate forms together.
The work is also a reflection of the relationship between the artist’s mental health and her art, and apart from this painting’s origins with Dr Reinink, Kusama’s relationship with the infinity net form is a particularly profound one. Struggling since childhood with a mental illness she calls obsessional neurosis, she has chosen to live in a mental hospital in Japan since 1977; the infinity nets, with their fixations and repetitions, seem to exist as both a symptom of Kusama’s obsessive tendencies and a means of therapy for them, both a tormenting hallucination and a sublime, totalising vision that ecstatically unites self and world: ‘[I]t is hard to say after all’ she says, ‘whether these signature repetitions were caused by my disease… or by own intention’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 36). In either case, Kusama uses her paintings to reach out to us as viewers, enveloping us in the expanse of the work and communicating a sense of the intensity of Kusama’s own experience as an artist and a human being – where everything can be refined into the tiny white dots speckling the canvas.
—YAYOI KUSAMA
As an all-over pattern of golden yellow dots unfurls against a white background, subtle suggestions of form and motion seem to swell and recede across the board like hallucinations: Untitled is a dizzying journey into the infinite. Painted in 1970 at the estate of Dr Maarten Reinink while he was treating the artist, and given afterwards to the psychiatrist – the painting comes with the pallet and paintbrush used by Kusama on the reverse – it is a vivid, fantastical example of Yayoi Kusama’s career-defining ‘infinity net’ paintings. The bright airiness of its gauzy pattern of dots offset against the brilliant burnished gold of the canvas, the work alchemises a feeling of both lightness and weight – but it is also underpinned by an emotional intensity contained within the artist’s obsessive, individualised markings. A feat of remarkable stamina and focus, Kusama labours for hours, meticulously repeating – though not replicating – each dot in order to create the net’s rippling effect; working inches from the work’s surface, the process of painting becomes an all-consuming, almost spiritual experience, the world distilled to one simple form.
The pattern has characterised Kusama’s art from the very beginning; this work was produced in 1970, twenty years after her first dot paintings were exhibited in Japan, and at the end of a decade in which she had thrilled and scandalised the New York art world, but her earliest piece featuring a dot-design was made even earlier, at the age of ten – a drawing of a woman in a kimono, thought to be the artist’s mother, obliterated by a sea of dots. Through her career she has transferred the pattern onto objects, clothing, walls and even human bodies, as her work has migrated across mediums, into performance art, installation and fashion. In some sense, this sense of continuity is of central importance to Kusama’s work; just as in her vision of the flower-pattern, filling ‘the room, my body, the entire universe’, Kusama’s oeuvre seeks to reveal a world structured by one guiding principle, bonding disparate forms together.
The work is also a reflection of the relationship between the artist’s mental health and her art, and apart from this painting’s origins with Dr Reinink, Kusama’s relationship with the infinity net form is a particularly profound one. Struggling since childhood with a mental illness she calls obsessional neurosis, she has chosen to live in a mental hospital in Japan since 1977; the infinity nets, with their fixations and repetitions, seem to exist as both a symptom of Kusama’s obsessive tendencies and a means of therapy for them, both a tormenting hallucination and a sublime, totalising vision that ecstatically unites self and world: ‘[I]t is hard to say after all’ she says, ‘whether these signature repetitions were caused by my disease… or by own intention’ (Y. Kusama, quoted in L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 36). In either case, Kusama uses her paintings to reach out to us as viewers, enveloping us in the expanse of the work and communicating a sense of the intensity of Kusama’s own experience as an artist and a human being – where everything can be refined into the tiny white dots speckling the canvas.