Yayoi Kusama

signed and titled in English, dated 2002 on the reverse

Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Asian Collection

Japan, Nagano Perfecture, Karuizawa New Art Museum, I Love Myself Too Much!! Yayoi Kusama, April 11 - 23 September, 2013, p. 116

This work is generally in good condition. Upon close examination, there are occasional minor soiling around the edges and on some of the impasto. Comparing with the image in the catalogue, the layers of the actual painting are more intense and the white is carrying a gentle wash of light yellow. Under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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“Everything- myself, others, the entire universe- would be obliterated by white nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots.”

Explosion in the Sky
Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s art is revolutionary. Throughout her five decade long career, the Japanese artist has created a body of psychedelic works that not only withstood the course of time, but successfully broke away from the limits of nationality,   geography, gender and art. Considering her five solo exhibitions just in 2013, including two major retrospective shows that travelled throughout museums in South America and Asia, Yayoi Kusama’s ever growing popularity has without a doubt set her as one of the greatest contemporary artists of all time. While the artist is known to trot across different medium, from phallus-like soft sculptures, polka dots covered collages, mirrored installations, to notorious street performances; the iconic white Infinity Nets series in the late 1950s was certainly an indisputable origin that first propelled the artist’s rare phenomenal heights. Throughout time, this series would also become a fundamental visual code in the discourse of contemporary art, exuding immense influence on young generations of Western and Asian artists working today. While many of her later Infinity Nets paintings have taken on a change in the colour palette, white is the ultimate emblem to signify Kusama’s original success. Sotheby’s is pleased to present Nets Obsession (Lot 136) from 2002, a representative work from the early 2000s to feature the original minimalist aesthetics of the white Infinity Nets series. Rendered in acrylic, the work arguably encapsulates not only the spirit of the monumental paintings that set her on the forefront of the New York art scene, but also the strategic transition of her artistic method after the artist’s permanent return to Japan in the early 1970s.

Born in 1929 in the rural town of Matsumoto, the young Kusama dreamed to one day take over the art world by storm. In 1959, only two years after her arrival in America, she was to achieve this utterly impossible feat with the creation of the Infinity Nets series. Featured in her first solo exhibition “Obsessional Monochrome” at the Brata Gallery in New York and numerous group exhibitions in the region, the series was a tremendous sensation and immediately captured the art world’s attention, including Picasso scholar Dore Ashton, Donald Judd and Frank Stella; the latter two both collected one of the earliest works. In his article “Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month- Yayoi Kusama” from Artnews, Donald Judd commented, “Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent.”¹ Indeed, the minimalistic quality of endless white arcs atop the black backgrounds can certainly be described as Kusama’s main vehicle in breaking into the male-dominated New York art scene at the time. They would   eventually also become a crucial force against the dominating Abstract Expressionism ideal in New York, ultimately paving the way for the rise of Minimalism, the repetitive aesthetics of Pop Art, and  the Zero Art Movement in Europe.

While many have at first considered the iconic pattern to be a purely aesthetical statement, for Kusama these tiny arcs are powerful tools that operate far beyond the framework of visual art. “My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots- an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among billions. I issued a manifesto stating that everything- myself, others, the entire universe- would be obliterated by white nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots.”² Having experienced serious hallucinations since she was young, the organic pattern created with a simple movement of the wrist is essentially a meditative channel for the artist to transcend the plague of ongoing hallucinations to the real world. It is also a crucial foundation upon which the artist extends her later practice beyond the canvas. “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 standing at the center of the obsession over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.”³

The original and distinctive aesthetics of the white Infinity Nets series not only caused viral momentum within the United States, but also gained attraction from across the Atlantic Ocean in the European art scene. Along with Mark Rothko, Yayoi Kusama was one of only two artists invited from America, and ultimately the only Japanese female artist to participate in the “Monochrome Malerei” (Monochrome Painting) exhibition curated by Udo Kultermann at the Staedtisches Museum in Leverkusen in March 1960. It was a major exhibition devoted to works created after the Post- WWII period, with artworks by some of the most renowned avant-garde artists at the time such as Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni. To exhibit her white on black Infinity Nets paintings along with these artists was a further affirmation of the intrinsic essence of the series. Through this exhibition, many scholars have attempted to compare and contrast the aesthetics between Kusama’s works with the different Western artists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and the European artist group Zero; it was arguably a gesture that was unheard of at the time for any Japanese female artists. According to scholar Alexandra Munroe on Kusama’s participation in the exhibition, “Characteristics of Kusama’s [white] Infinity Nets paintings which relate to the Zero and Nul artists’ work are monochrome and non-compositional design, as advanced and articulated by Yves Klein, a mentor of the Zero group. […] Kusama’s paintings differ from Zero and Nul, however, in many of the same ways it differed from American Minimalism. […] Kusama’s repetition was never mechanistic or deductive, but the product of obsessional, compulsive performance.”⁴

Throughout the 1960s and after the artist’s return to her homeland in 1973, the Infinity Nets would frequently reappear in different media and forms. While some of the later paintings bear a gradient appearance, others began to take on bold colour tones and sizes. As the millennium embarked, Kusama would pay an increasingly large amount of time to installation and sculptural works, making the Infinity Nets fewer in numbers. Measuring around 160 by 160 centimeters, the square shaped Nets Obsession is without a doubt a signatory work to evoke the spiritual presence of the original Infinity Nets paintings. Rendered in white arcs against a greyish blue background, it also showcases a gradual and subtle aesthetics shift within the series. At the same time, the rendering of the acrylic paint found here would also reflect an important stylistic move by the artist in the 1980s, when she moved away from using the oil paint medium. Thus, the textural surface can certainly be seen as a bridge between the early thickly-coated paintings from the early 1960s, and the aesthetically refined works after her return to Japan. In truth, as seen in Nets Obsession, the Infinity Nets paintings are deeply ingrained with Kusama’s passion and perseverance, standing far apart from the rest of her work in demonstrating the artist’s genuine artistry and astronomical vision. As she exclaimed in her autobiography, “Bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot [from the net pattern]. That was the way I saw it, and I had no ears to listen. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”⁵

1 Donald Judd, “Reviews and Previews: New Names This Month- Yayoi Kusama.” Artnews 58, No. 6, October, 1989, p. 17
2 Yayoi Kusama, “Taking My Stand with a Single Polka Dot”, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, 2011, p.23
3 Udo Kultermann, “Yayoi Kusama and the Concept of Obsession in Contemporary Art”, Yayoi Kusama: Obsession
4 Alexandra Munroe, “Radical,Will: Yayoi Kusama and the International Avant Garde- Kusama’s Painting and Sculpture in the 1960s”, Yayoi Kusama: Between Heaven and Earth, Fuji Television Gallery Co.,Ltd, 1991
5 Refer to 2