Nets 31

Yayoi Kusama

“One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern. I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space. This was not an illusion but reality itself. I was shocked to see to the depths of my soul."

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, London 2011

Kusama’s Infinity Nets is the artist’s largest and most acclaimed body of work. The artist exhibited her first Infinity Net paintings in New York in 1959. Employing the minimal repeated gesture of a single touch of the brush, Kusama’s revolutionary paintings responded critically to the emotionally and semiotically charged brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Albeit a relative novice to oil painting at the time, Kusama was able to at once firmly grasp and radically redefine the medium in bold defiance of gestural abstraction, meting out the ecstatic masculine gesture into dainty increments and forging a sophisticated feminine aesthetics of obsession and repetition. Replacing the expressive gesture with an exhaustive one, Kusama’s meticulous and labor-intensive methods literally pushed painting to its limits. The New York art scene was fascinated, with critics describing her work in oceanic terms: "huge" in scale and composed of "innumerable small arcs", like waves.

Kusama Nets 31
3 images
Artist
Yayoi Kusama (b.1929)
Title
Nets 31
Medium
Acrylic on canvas
Date
1998
Size
18 x 15 in : 45.7 x 38.1 cm
Inscriptions
Signed, titled and dated on the reverse
Provenance
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
with Fabian and Claude Walter Galerie, Zürich
Private Collection
Certification
This work is accompanied by a registration card from the Yayoi Kusama studio.
Reference
AC25-40
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Status
Available
Nets 31 - Yayoi Kusama

Nets 31 - Yayoi Kusama
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