Expanding outward in a delicate lattice of intricate loops and swirls, Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary Infinity Nets G.E.R. is a triumphant test.mes nt to the enduring, mesmerizing power of the artist’s signature abstract mode. Executed in 1999, the present work marks the apex of a period of major and highly celebrated retrospectives that wholly solidified Kusama’s status and significance within the context of the contemporary art canon. In its intricately constructed surface of undulating forms, Infinity Nets G.E.R. is a superb exemplar from the artist’s iconic series of Infinity Nets; a mesmerizing body of work the artist has produced over a period of fifty years, 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. Executed across three towering panels, the enormous surface of Infinity Nets G.E.R. achieves the artist’s ultimate goal: to momentarily draw the viewer into Kusama’s own, definitive experience of infinity.

Enveloping the viewer within its gleaming surface, Infinity Nets G.E.R 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 turquoise 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.

Initially conceptualized after the artist moved from Japan to Manhattan in the late 1950s, Kusama 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; in her own words, the artist describes: “I was always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me." (The artist cited in: Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000, p. 103) 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. Produced decades after the first, intimately scaled examples from that series, the towering surface of Infinity Nets G.E.R. continues that legacy with a newfound gravitas, employing the same repetitive and hypnotic mark making that characterizes Kusama’s oeuvre upon a far more impressive scale. Executed in the mature period of the artist’s career, Infinity Nets G.E.R. is painted in acrylic pigment rather than oil. Kusama transitioned to this water-soluble medium in the 1980s, which built on her foundational training in traditional Japanese watercolor. The faster drying t.mes of acrylic speaks to the artist’s relentless endurance and will to paint, cultivated over years of unending artmaking. This technical development speaks to the artist’s desire to enact her vision with an efficiency and ferocity that reflects her sense of purpose and emotional investment in her body of work as a whole. Indeed, the effort Kusama has invested within the present work is, in turn, invested in the viewer: standing before Infinity Nets G.E.R., t.mes and space dilate as the viewer is entirely absorbed into Kusama’s singular conceptual vision.

Artist

Yayoi Kusama