.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
A rare early example of Yayoi Kusama’s signature ‘infinity nets’, Yayoi Kusama’s An Island (13) (1955) is a coruscating jewel of colour. With its tendrils extending across the canvas in a rich purple, Kusama’s net encloses pockets of green and vivid red, a psychedelic juxtaposition of tones that seems to imprint itself directly onto the viewer’s eye, its colours vibrating on the paper as they react against one another. Yet these bright, almost electrified tones are realised with a gossamer delicacy, with Kusama’s painstaking brushwork carefully structuring a vertiginous, weightless feeling of space and depth that, even within its small frame, gives the work the sense of infinitude that defines the artist’s oeuvre – a kind of porthole looking onto an ocean of endless colour, enveloping the viewer in its washes of brilliant colour.
Although Kusama’s dot painting can apparently be traced back to her childhood – her earliest recorded work, made at the age of ten, is a drawing of a woman in a kimono obliterated by spots – this work is a particularly early example of her mature ‘infinity net’ style, dating from before her move to America in 1957. The infinity net was honed during her time in New York during the late 1950s and ‘60s, with her 1959 exhibition at the Brata Gallery often seen as a major landmark in its development; a collection of five large, white nets, it attracted praise from Donald Judd and established the artist as one of the New York art world’s most exciting talents, straddling the new visual languages of minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop while remaining decidedly idiosyncratic. Yet in An Island (13) we are offered a tantalising early glimpse of this vision: a beautiful formulation of the planes of floating, repeating pattern that unfurl over her later canvases.
Although Kusama’s dot painting can apparently be traced back to her childhood – her earliest recorded work, made at the age of ten, is a drawing of a woman in a kimono obliterated by spots – this work is a particularly early example of her mature ‘infinity net’ style, dating from before her move to America in 1957. The infinity net was honed during her time in New York during the late 1950s and ‘60s, with her 1959 exhibition at the Brata Gallery often seen as a major landmark in its development; a collection of five large, white nets, it attracted praise from Donald Judd and established the artist as one of the New York art world’s most exciting talents, straddling the new visual languages of minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop while remaining decidedly idiosyncratic. Yet in An Island (13) we are offered a tantalising early glimpse of this vision: a beautiful formulation of the planes of floating, repeating pattern that unfurl over her later canvases.