Yayoi Kusama

Galerie Piéce Unique, Paris

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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In 1958 Yayoi Kusama would begin the series of paintings that to this day still embody the very core of her artistic output: the Infinity Nets. An exercise in obsessional repetition that operates within a monochrome formal economy, these paintings have continued to proliferate out of Kusama’s studio for over 50 years: first emerging from New York where she exploded onto the art scene during the 1960s, and then from her studio in Tokyo that is adjoined to the private psychiatric facility in which the artist has lived since 1977. Executed in 2007, Infinity Nets (FCPR) relates back to the incipient Nets created during the 1960s in its palette of red over a white monochrome ground. Where the very first nets created in the late 1950s consisted exclusively of viscous glots of white oil painted over a black ground and bathed in a thin white wash, red announced Kusama’s first foray into colour. Having since painted her Nets in a kaleidoscopic array of chromatic combinations, it is the combination of white, red, and black that most immediately communicates the primal psychological and corporeal bent of her monochrome production. Indeed, while Kusama’s work deserves its place within the prevailing abstract movements of the post-war period – from Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in New York to ZERO and Nul in Europe – hers is a creative practice compelled by a distinctly personal pathology: a psychical condition experienced as an enveloping hallucinatory veil of grisaille and red dots.

Kusama suffers from a chronic form of anxiety for which the determining symptom is also credited with the origin of her transgressive artistic vision: since childhood Kusama has been plagued by hallucinations in which she is overwhelmed by a profusion of dots, nets, or flowers that blanket her environment and threaten to envelop her. The effect on Kusama’s sense of an embodied self is annihilative. Referred to as ‘self-obliteration’, her grasp on reality disintegrates into a nothingness that is also perceived as an experience of infinity.

These troubling symptoms took root in the traumas of her childhood. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, Kusama grew up surrounded by flowers on the family’s plant nursery in rural Matsumoto. Her father was extravagant, philandering and increasingly absent, while the family business, into which he married, was ran by her domineering mother. Exacerbated by Kusama’s incessant ambition to become an artist, a profession deemed below the family seat and unsuitable for a woman, Kusama suffered bouts of verbal and even physical abuse at her mother’s hands. Indeed, the very first artistic occurrence of the Nets is particularly telling in this regard. Produced at the age of 10, a naïve pencil outline of a woman which the artist has identified as her mother is veiled in the speckled dot-like pattern that would later find replication in the seemingly infinite series of paintings to which the present work belongs.

However, in not wishing to over-determine a reading of her art purely in terms of psychobiography, it is the unique coalition of her psychological condition and the socio-political backdrop of the Twentieth Century that marks Kusama’s work as particularly groundbreaking. The psychological impact of familial turbulence was undoubtedly compounded within a threatre of war and its onslaught of collective trauma. The increasing militarisation of Japan during Kusama’s childhood – its totalitarian rule and later American occupation after the Second World War – was keenly felt by the artist; an empathy for political pathos that continued into Kusama’s anti-war Happenings towards the end of the 1960s and radical stance against phallocentric symbols - such as her Accumulation Sculptures in which everyday objects were covered in an obsessive profusion of stuffed fabric 'penises'. Couched in the formal language of coeval monochromism yet driven by marginality, Kusama’s visual economy of psychologically charged fragmentation and repetition has opened up radical new modes of subjectivity in art making.