Infinity Nets, Pumpkins, and the Mysterious Power Behind Kusama's 'Obsessional' Practice

Initially conceptualized after the artist moved from Japan to Manhattan in the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama's series of Infinity Nets sprouted from a deep-seated ambition to establish herself in the New York art world. Resplendent with endlessly repeating strokes, the works in the series are a manifestation of and coping mechanism for the artist’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and hallucinations brought on by a psychological condition. Diagnosed with these disorders as a child, Kusama struggled with visions of infinitely oscillating, kaleidoscopic patterns throughout her childhood in Japan.

It was not until her arrival in the United States, however, that Kusama found the means of channeling her psychosomatic visions and tendencies into the paintings that would form the beginning of the iconic Infinity Nets series. Working with a focus both obsessive and meditative, Kusama would move her brush across the canvas with precise, minute flicks of the wrist, carefully weaving the complex skein of overlapping loops to create an undulating pattern that calls to mind the simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying glimpse of infinity one experiences before a seemingly endless expanse of shimmering water.

Executed in a distinctive palette of gold and chartreuse, Kusama’s INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) is a testament to the spellbinding power of the artist’s signature abstract mode. Created in 2013 decades after the first examples from that series, INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) continues that legacy with a newfound gravitas, and marks the apex of a period of major and highly celebrated retrospectives that wholly solidified Kusama’s stature within contemporary art canon. In its intricately constructed surface of undulating forms, INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) is an exemplar from the artist’s iconic series of Infinity Nets; these iconic works serve as the cornerstone of Kusama’s artistic practice and the foundation for the remainder of her sculptures, installations, and varied painterly output.

Enveloping the viewer within its gleaming surface, INFINITY-NETS (NOLM) is at once meditative and emphatic, intricate and explosive, utterly abstract and entirely specific. Below the labyrinthine web of golden loops, the saturated azure hue of the painting’s ground invites the viewer to immerse him or herself within its chartreuse depths. Kusama’s use of metallic pigment imbues the present work with an aura of exquisite light; the work is ethereal, texturally anomalous and full of reflected illumination. The artist’s innumerable brushstrokes pile onto one another, culminating in some parts of the canvas in mounds of expressive impasto, and congealing into radiating planes of pigment in others. Each dab of paint is laid with a punctilious devotion to the act of mark making, consuming the canvas in a field of texture. At first glance, the disparate layers of pigment are deceptively legible; yet upon further inspection, the hypnotic skeins of paints begin to dilate and pulsate, creating an extraordinary and intriguing visual interplay within the painting’s depths.

As universally emblematic of Kusama’s oeuvre as the Campbell’s soup can was to Andy Warhol’s, the pumpkin is deeply central to the artist’s psyche, and its origins within her art can be traced back to as early as age 19. In 1948, Kusama enrolled in a fourth-year course at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.

“During my time in Kyoto I diligently painted pumpkins, which in later years would become an important theme in my art," wrote the artist in her autobiography. Kusama recalls having consumed the vegetable endlessly to the point of nausea in her childhood years during and after the war; in spite of this, she retains a fond attachment to its organic bulbous form, describing it as embodying a “generous unpretentiousness” and “solid spiritual balance.”

Already experiencing hallucinations involving pumpkins that spoke to her in a most animated manner, Kusama found the gourd a benign and nurturing subject – as opposed to the menace she felt from flowers, plants and objects that plagued her throughout her life. Kusama’s early pumpkins were painted with traditional Nihonga materials, which she left behind after her move from Matsumoto to New York in 1958.

Kusama stunned the New York art scene with her radical Infinity Nets in 1959, executed in the Western medium of oil, which were followed by her Accumulation soft sculptures in 1961. In 1965 Kusama infused explosions of colour into her sculptures through the use of dotted and striped fabrics; by this time, the sheer breadth, scale and ambition of her diverse cross-media oeuvre had taken over the city like an epidemic. Her ubiquitous polka-dot and net motifs, manifested in mesmeric paintings, immersive rooms, hypnotic installations, body art and participatory performances, forged a wholly unique aesthetic that articulated a rigorous, overwhelming language of obsession and obliteration – a language that enabled the artist to combat her hallucinatory mental illness.

After an explosive rise to fame in New York in the 1960s, Kusama retreated into a psychiatric hospital in Japan in 1975, withdrawing into a period of semi-obscurity whilst quietly amassing a prolific body of work. It was during this time that Kusama revisited her earlier pumpkin motif, combining her signature all-over Nets and obliterating polka-dot aesthetic with the theme of her favourite gourd. During the 1980s Kusama explored colourful variations of her pumpkin-pattern in two-dimensional paintings, drawings and prints; over the years her rendering of pumpkin ‘skin’ grew ever more deft and accomplished, with the flowing lines of dots advancing and receding rhythmically in a fastidiously precise yet dynamically organic manner. Even the seemingly blank or ‘undotted’ segments are overlaid with miniscule specks, contributing to a complex and intensely laborious configuration that pulsates and disorients with energy akin to that of Op art paintings.

Appreciation for Kusama’s work grew steadily, and in 1993, her international revival was made official when she was invited as the first solo artist and first woman ever to grace the Japanese pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale. For the occasion, Kusama constructed Mirror Room (Pumpkin), consuming the entire interior of the pavilion in an immersive floor-to-ceiling extravaganza of black-on-yellow polka dots. At its centre was a dazzling mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures, echoing her seminal 1966 Infinity Mirror Room—Love Forever whilst introducing the theme of the pumpkin. Five years later in 1998, coinciding with the creation of the present two lots, another major milestone was reached when Kusama became subject of the defining solo exhibition “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998, which subsequently travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A-PUMPKIN (CHA) was created in 2011, when Kusama had already become a global household name. The work is a resplendent, flawlessly executed archetype from Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre. In the background, Kusama’s all-over scaled tessellations – an iconic iteration of the artist’s most distinctive infinity net motif employed often within her pumpkin paintings – are so tightly and dexterously woven that the canvas hums with the rhythmic intensity of the pattern. The pumpkin itself, anthropomorphic and brilliantly luminous, presents the legendary artist at the height of her powers: each gleaming circle shimmers and vibrates; each meticulously crafted row of multi-striated dots throbs and slithers fluidly down the body of the gourd.

The artist’s international resurgence and rise to global stardom occurred in parallel with – and was inextricably tied with – her iconic pumpkin motif. It was to pumpkins that Kusama turned for solace during her period of reclusion, and it was with pumpkins in mind that she set about creating a work for her momentous Venice Biennale comeback. The pumpkin stands as a symbol of triumph for the artist’s personal as well as artistic rebirth, representing a mediation of the artist’s psychiatric illness that went hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing sophistication, dexterity and creativity of her creations.