Beschreibung:

Yayoi Kusama Follow INFINITY-NETS (QRTWE) signed, titled and dated 'Yayoi Kusama 2007 "INFINITY-NETS QRTWE"' on the reverse acrylic on canvas 194 x 259 cm (76 3/8 x 101 7/8 in.) Painted in 2007, this work is accompanied by a registration card issued by the Yayoi Kusama studio.
Provenance Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo Victoria Miro, London Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above) Phillips, New York, 8 May 2016, lot 24 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited London, Victoria Miro, Yayoi Kusama , 10 October - 17 November 2007 Catalogue Essay Painted in 2007, INFINITY-NETS (QRTWE) is a stellar example from Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s most celebrated and best-known series, begun in the late 1950s and extending into the new millennium. The Infinity Net paintings were born in conjunction with Kusama’s relocation from Tokyo to New York in 1958, where she was introduced to the pre-existing avant-garde schools like Abstract Expressionism as well as emerging movements like Minimalism. In the present work, the artist relies on both abstraction and repetition to cover the expanse of the large-scale canvas in a lustrous white acrylic atop a gray ground. The present work thus recalls the artistic tendencies Kusama came into contact with at the time of the series’ conception, from the action painting of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to the meditative qualities of repetition which were coming to the fore with the work of Donald Judd and Frank Stella Indeed, the abstract motifs contained in the Infinity Nets , achieved through a painstaking process that combats the traumas of her psychological abyss, were for Kusama, a way of coping with her lifelong psychosomatic anxiety. These intensely personal undertones differentiate her Minimalist aesthetic from the works of Western artists in both Europe and the United States. As Alexandra Munroe pointed out, ‘Kusama’s paintings differ from Zero and Nul … 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’ (Alexandra Munroe, ‘Radical Will: Yayoi Kusama and the International Avant Garde – Kusama’s Paintings and Sculpture in the 1960s’ in Yayoi Kusama Between Heaven and Earth , exh. cat., Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, 1991, n.p.). In the present work, polka-dotted nets overlap each other in interweaving forms, creating larger, biomorphic shapes that oscillate between foreground and background. As white and grey hues collide, the composition explores the unique qualities of monochromatic paint in the resulting contrast of light and shadow. While entirely abstract, the nets seem to move across the surface, activating an almost three-dimensional quality through larger spirals and veils. Such a complex surface can only be achieved through Kusama’s meticulous process that highlights both the hand of the artist and the properties of her medium, juxtaposing a thin application of wash-like paint with thick impasto. Trained in traditional Japanese Nihonga painting, which is characterised by naturalistic realism, Kusama received a formal education in the techniques of perspective and shading to illustrate three-dimensional forms. As such, while entirely abstract, Kusama’s nets also possess a formal quality that recalls the modulation of tones found in monochromatic Nihonga works of the early 1900s. INFINITY-NETS (QRTWE) was first shown at the artist’s two-part exhibition at Victoria Miro in London the same year of its creation in 2007. Hung alongside other Infinity Nets paintings from the same year, the monochromatic paintings uniquely recalled the artist’s earliest white net paintings unveiled at Brata Gallery in New York, following the artist’s move to the United States in 1959. Her decision to use white acrylic paint can be seen as both an adverse response to the vibrancy of brushstrokes found in the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and also a precursor for the Minimalist aesthetics of emerging artists of the time like Robert Ryman Early champions of Kusama's monochrome Infinity Nets included Donald Judd who aptly described the effect of the paintings after the Brata Gallery show: ‘The effect is bot