‘I am putting every efort toward creating my works from morning till night on every single day.’ Yayoi Kusama
Alma Woodsey Thomas, Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset, 1970, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. © Alma Woodsey Thomas, 2020. Image: 2020, Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource/ Scala, Florence.
Painted in 2017, INFINITY-NETS (KSUZL) is a resplendent example from Yayoi Kusama’s eponymous series, begun in the late 1950s and extending to the present day. Born in conjunction with Kusama’s relocation from Tokyo to New York in 1958, where she was introduced to the avant-garde school of Abstract Expressionism and the emerging movement of Minimalism, the artist’s Infnity Net paintings boast her most celebrated symbol – the spot – duplicated ad infnitum. In the present work, a subtly concealed red background glistens underneath an overarching orange web, exploring the lively interaction between the two pigments and the rhythmic lattice structure that unifes them. In INFINITY-NETS (KSUZL), a plethora of polka-dotted nets ritualistically overlap each other in interweaving forms, creating larger, biomorphic shapes that waver from foreground to background. Kusama achieved this complex surface through a meticulous process enacted throughout her practice, whereby each dot is minutely placed
atop a laid ground to create a perfectly attuned image. As a result, the nets seem to move across the surface symbiotically, activating an almost three-dimensional presence through the formation of larger spirals and veils. Trained in traditional Japanese Nihonga painting – a genre 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. In its all-consuming aesthetic, INFINITY-NETS (KSUZL) furthermore evokes the artistic tendencies that Kusama came into contact with at the time of the series’ conception, from the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, to the meditative and repetitive qualities found in Donald Judd and Frank Stella’s work. With its bloodorange and fery-red hues, it notably calls to mind the incandescent art of Alma Thomas, and specifcally her Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped