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拍品专文
From beneath a vast field of bright white contours, glimpses of a silvery grey void emerge: Yayoi Kusama’s 2007 painting Infinity Nets (FUMW) develops the series of works that first brought the artist international acclaim, and remain her best known and most celebrated works. Rendered in gleaming acrylic, which the artist has used since the 1980s for its quick-drying properties, the work is one of a series of white Infinity Net paintings that the artist has produced since the turn of the century, yet it shimmers with a particular lustre, the subtleties of its shifting depths and contours unfolding across the canvas with exceptional delicacy and subtlety. Its expanse of white hints at figurative reference – the quiet chaos of a snowstorm, or the immersive interior of a cloud – while also suggesting strands of symbolic import: white as the colour of purity, innocence or simply void. Yet reducing the canvas to these straightforwardly connotative readings fails to account for the painting’s larger mystery and majesty – a mass of repetition and form that slowly envelops the viewer in a psychic space that feels at once distant from reality and intimately connected with nature.
Kusama’s personal visions and hallucinations are famously integral to her work – she has been affected by apparitions of the kind of repeating patterns found in her work since she was a child – yet the vital relationship between Kusama and her art historical context also should not be ignored. Throughout her career Kusama’s art has played a fascinating, and indeed crucial, role in synthesising and anticipating artistic movements that have surrounded her. When she began to exhibit them in New York, shortly after arriving in the city in the late 1950s, the Infinity Net paintings served to mediate between several emerging schools of painting. On the one hand they seemed to represent a variation on the all-over stylings of the great Abstract Expressionists who had come to define New York art during the decade, expressions of a ritualistic, almost shamanic painting practice that, like Jackson Pollock, strove to both express the painter’s selfhood while paradoxically dissolving it.
However in eschewing explosive, gestural ‘action painting’ for a hyper-focused, repetitive style of brushwork carried out in miniature, the Infinity Nets also heralded nascent developments in Minimalism, their simple self-containment and the purity of their formal articulation chiming with the way in which Frank Stella and Donald Judd were beginning to conceptualise their own practice. Indeed, this Infinity Net recalls the white paintings that Kusama produced in 1959 and that were praised by Judd in one of the first published reviews of the artist’s work, paintings that should also be considered important antecedents for the work done in white by Robert Ryman.
Yet though its significance to the development of post-war art cannot be ignored, ultimately Kusama’s work breaks free from easy categorisation. At the root of her work is a highly idiosyncratic personal vision of all-consuming intensity, drawing her in new directions even as she returns to her central themes. As she says herself: ‘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 L. Hoptman and U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, New York 2000, p. 103).
Kusama’s personal visions and hallucinations are famously integral to her work – she has been affected by apparitions of the kind of repeating patterns found in her work since she was a child – yet the vital relationship between Kusama and her art historical context also should not be ignored. Throughout her career Kusama’s art has played a fascinating, and indeed crucial, role in synthesising and anticipating artistic movements that have surrounded her. When she began to exhibit them in New York, shortly after arriving in the city in the late 1950s, the Infinity Net paintings served to mediate between several emerging schools of painting. On the one hand they seemed to represent a variation on the all-over stylings of the great Abstract Expressionists who had come to define New York art during the decade, expressions of a ritualistic, almost shamanic painting practice that, like Jackson Pollock, strove to both express the painter’s selfhood while paradoxically dissolving it.
However in eschewing explosive, gestural ‘action painting’ for a hyper-focused, repetitive style of brushwork carried out in miniature, the Infinity Nets also heralded nascent developments in Minimalism, their simple self-containment and the purity of their formal articulation chiming with the way in which Frank Stella and Donald Judd were beginning to conceptualise their own practice. Indeed, this Infinity Net recalls the white paintings that Kusama produced in 1959 and that were praised by Judd in one of the first published reviews of the artist’s work, paintings that should also be considered important antecedents for the work done in white by Robert Ryman.
Yet though its significance to the development of post-war art cannot be ignored, ultimately Kusama’s work breaks free from easy categorisation. At the root of her work is a highly idiosyncratic personal vision of all-consuming intensity, drawing her in new directions even as she returns to her central themes. As she says herself: ‘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 L. Hoptman and U. Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, New York 2000, p. 103).