YAYOIKUSAMA(b. 1929)Infinity Nets (White).Oil on canvas.51 ¼ x 46 ¼ in. (130.2 x 117.5 cm).Executed in 1959.This work is accompanied by a photocertificate signed by the artist.Provenance
Galerie Thelen, EssenExhibited
Essen, Galerie Thelen, 1966;
Museum Bochum Sammlung Helmut Klinker, May 12-July 1, 1984, p. 193;
Milan, Naviglio Gallery and Essen, Galerie Thelen, Driving Image Show, May 1966It has been said of many late 20th Century artists that their lives and their art are inseparable. This is true of Yayoi Kusama, not in a figurative sense but in a concrete visceral one. Kusama is the Infinity Nets and the polka dot, two interchangeable motifs that she adopted as her alter ego, her logo, her franchise, her weapon of incursion into the world at large. The countless artworks that she has produced and that marry Kusama's nets and dots into the world, when seen as a whole , are the mere results of a rigourously disciplined and single-minded performance that has lasted for nearly 50 years. (L. Hoptman, A. Tatehata, U. Kulterman, Yayoi Kusama, 2000, p. 34)

Suffering from a psychological condition which traces its roots back to her early childhood, Yoyoi Kusama has approached her artistic pursuits with an unwavering obsessive energy and zeal. The works that she has created for nearly five decades serve as a form of "artistic transubstantiation" bringing forth imagery, emotions and visions that populate the vast landscape of her troubled mind.

The present lot Infinity Nets from 1959 illustrates a theme that has permeated every fiber of Kusama's work and being for the past five decades. The monochromatic web-like pattern engulfing the entire surface of the canvas is exemplary of the Infinity Nets works that Kusama was creating in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Although the work itself is devoid of color Kusuma in no way equated herself to other artists working monochromatically. The Infinity Nets take on a multitude of shapes and forms spanning multiple genres- painting, sculpture, installation and performance- executed in an equally varied range of media. They were more based upon an obsessive need to release the images from her mind or more to the point purge herself of her hallucinations by making them a reality; a catharsis of sorts. When describing her visions Kusama states

"…I am deeply terrifed by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality"
(ibid, pp. 17-18)

That the work was, and is, obsessive is doubtless, but hardly, the result of an ungovernable compulsion. Kusama herself has stated that, 'it is hard to say afterall, whether these signature repetitions were caused by my disease…or by my intention'. Claiming her illness as a generative force it is also in her words, 'a weapon' not only to 'tide over the hardship of life' but to leave her artistic mark. In her paintings as well as in her carreer as a whole, Kusama has never ceded control – not even to her illness. The symptoms of Kusama's disorder are helpful in our understanding of her imagery but they are not the subject of her work. They are the engine that drives it. (ibid, p. 37)