Nets Infinity

An intricate web of thick, gold pigmented acrylic unfurls atop a glistening metallic gold background in Yayoi Kusama’s hypnotic painting Nets Infinity. Reminiscent of a blazing sun, the elaborate pattern saturates the entire surface of the work, imbuing it with a sense of form and motion that seems to swell and recede across the canvas like a hallucinatory vision. Executed in 1998, the work was created in the same year of Kusama’s landmark retrospective Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1969, which toured the USA and Japan. Exhibited at the likes of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the show received great critical acclaim worldwide. Nets Infinity is a vivid and fantastical example of the artist’s career-defining ‘infinity net’ paintings. With no definitive beginning or end, these iconic works read as dizzying journeys into the infinite. Indeed, in spite of its ostensibly flat façade, the present work seems almost alive, ebbing and flowing like the endless ocean tide. Kusama has achieved her signature polka-dot motif in this work through a dense accumulation of impasto paint. Painstakingly applied, this rhythmic lattice is offset against the brilliant burnished gold of the canvas beneath, creating a potent alchemy at once weighty and light, airy and congested. The work is underpinned by an emotional intensity contained within the artist’s obsessive, individualised markings. In feats of remarkable stamina and focus, Kusama is known to labour for hours over her works to the point of exhaustion, meticulously repeating – though never replicating – each loop or dot in order to create the net’s rippling effect. The process of painting becomes an all-consuming, almost spiritual experience, the world distilled to one simple form.

Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama moved to New York City on a leap of faith at the age of twenty-nine, hoping to make a name for herself in the burgeoning avant-garde art scene. Sure enough, her impact on the international art world was nothing short of profound, and her influence endures to this day: the cosmic sublimity of her mesmeric ‘infinity net’ compositions positioned her as heir to the Abstract Expressionist practices of her predecessors Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, whilst her monochromatic canvases presaged elements of the Minimalist movement that took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. In the subtle, shifting surfaces of the ‘infinity nets’, Kusama evokes a transcendental space that lies beyond the limits of the human imagination. This unique pattern emerged from a series of hallucinations which the artist began to experience when she was a child and which have continued throughout her life. From the age of ten, Kusama started seeing veils before her eyes. ‘One day’, she said, ‘looking at a red flower-patterned table cloth 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, A. Tatehata and U. Kultermann (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, pp. 35-36). In Nets Infinity, Kusama’s deeply personal vision is transformed into an expression of the diffuse nature of the human condition: a universal hymn to the infinite void that frames our existence.