.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ) explodes outward with mesmeric intensity, captivating the viewer within its apparently limitless field of painted black dots variegating organically against a vibrant yellow background. In INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ), Kusama unites the most significant themes of her extraordinary career into a poignant and mature retrospection of her celebrated oeuvre, establishing the ultimate spectacle in the artist’s incredible idiosyncratic artistic language.
Kusama combines her iconic Infinity Nets and Pumpkins motifs in INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ), creating a singular self-referential portrait employing her entire identity. Kusama began painting her Infinity Nets soon after her arrival in New York, first showing them in 1959. For her initial exposure to the Western art world, Kusama combined eastern and western styles to challenge the prevalent Abstract Expressionists with paintings pushing the limits of spatial conception. Her methodically rendered nets—constructed of meticulously repeated gestural strokes articulated as arcs of built up pigment across the canvas—speak to the artist’s technical facility and extraordinary physical stamina, which she skillfully employed to challenge then redefine the New York art scene. In the present work, she imbues this technique with her variegated black-on-yellow pattern typically reserved for her Pumpkin works, powerfully unifying her two great themes within a single tableau.
Her Pumpkins, works both painted and sculptural which explore the artist’s other main obsession, first emerged when she was a young art student in Kyoto. At this time, Kusama would meticulously execute images in Nihonga—a traditional Japanese painting technique—of pumpkins of various sizes. She did not return to the pumpkin motif until after her final return to Japan in 1973, a hiatus which speaks to the powerful specificity of place with which she imbues her work. The pumpkin motif is deeply resonant to Kusama, who employs it as an autobiographical device. The artist’s obsession with pumpkins, in particular, emerges from several powerful events occurring in early childhood; Gilda Williams writes how “as a child, [Kusama] experienced frightening hallucinations wherein the fields all around her home—in many of which the kabocha grew—seemed to morph terrifyingly into an all-engulfing, speckled pattern stretching seamlessly from heaven to earth, threatening to swallow her up within it” (G. Williams, “Infinite Nature: On Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins,” in Yayoi Kusama: Pumpkins, Victoria Miro, 2014, np). The painted pumpkin is integral to Kusama’s conception of self and, centered around her identity, functions as the artist's alter ego.
“Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep.” Yayoi Kusama
Kusama has since her early childhood weaponized her artistic production in defense against her hallucinations, waging a lonely battle against the psychosis she has suffered since childhood. While her pumpkins operate as autobiographical symbols, Infinity Nets evolves from a different hallucinosis: “I would cover the canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, or the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand toward infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. I work one morning and found the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled onto and into the skin of my hands” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, Louisiana Museum of Art, 2015, pp. 11-12). Kusama captures this all-consuming experience in her paintings, utilizing the space of the canvas to suggest a portal into a more expansive universe. A similar framing device is employed by Gustav Klimt in his Fir Forest I of 1901, where he crops a discrete section of a coniferous forest, severing tree trunks vertically at the edges of the canvas to denote a much grander scene. More than a merging of motifs and bridging of her New York and Japanese periods of production, INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ) recollects and engages with the deepest aspects of her psychology. Meditating on and resisting these two motifs for more than eight decades, Kusama finally unites the two together in the frenzied burst of therapeutic artistic energy demonstrated in the present lot.
In INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ), Kusama reinterprets her famous pumpkin motif, derived from the appearance of the typical kabocha pumpkin native to Japan, across a spatial plane adopted from her Infinity Nets, expanding the black-on-yellow pattern out into an infinite arrangement in space. The definitive statement from her New York period collides with her symbol of Japanese identity, evincing the bipartite essence of Kusama’s practice in which she amalgamates Eastern and Western influences. INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ) offers Kusama a solution to her attempts at capturing the all-consuming experience she first had with pumpkins, where they engulfed her entire world. No matter how large she fabricated her Pumpkin sculptures, the inherent integrity of the form limited the scope of her speckled pattern to the surface of the work, restraining her ability to express infinity. Merging this motif with the Infinity Nets allows her to flatten the Kabocha pattern in a way that denies a beginning or an end, the dots pervading across and beyond the canvas to fully immerse the viewer. No longer contained by the outlines of the pumpkin form, Kusama’s trademark pattern can expand across every surface, an effect similar to that achieved by the artist in her 1991 Mirror Room (Pumpkin).
Describing her teenage pumpkin fixation, Kusama writes how she would wake before dawn every day to “confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating [her] mind entirely upon the form before [her].” She continues: “Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep” (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2013, pg. 75). Seventy years later, Kusama remains just as committed, articulating her internal universe in a rapturous visual form whose expansive presence immerses the viewer within the artist’s grand enduring vision.
Kusama combines her iconic Infinity Nets and Pumpkins motifs in INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ), creating a singular self-referential portrait employing her entire identity. Kusama began painting her Infinity Nets soon after her arrival in New York, first showing them in 1959. For her initial exposure to the Western art world, Kusama combined eastern and western styles to challenge the prevalent Abstract Expressionists with paintings pushing the limits of spatial conception. Her methodically rendered nets—constructed of meticulously repeated gestural strokes articulated as arcs of built up pigment across the canvas—speak to the artist’s technical facility and extraordinary physical stamina, which she skillfully employed to challenge then redefine the New York art scene. In the present work, she imbues this technique with her variegated black-on-yellow pattern typically reserved for her Pumpkin works, powerfully unifying her two great themes within a single tableau.
Her Pumpkins, works both painted and sculptural which explore the artist’s other main obsession, first emerged when she was a young art student in Kyoto. At this time, Kusama would meticulously execute images in Nihonga—a traditional Japanese painting technique—of pumpkins of various sizes. She did not return to the pumpkin motif until after her final return to Japan in 1973, a hiatus which speaks to the powerful specificity of place with which she imbues her work. The pumpkin motif is deeply resonant to Kusama, who employs it as an autobiographical device. The artist’s obsession with pumpkins, in particular, emerges from several powerful events occurring in early childhood; Gilda Williams writes how “as a child, [Kusama] experienced frightening hallucinations wherein the fields all around her home—in many of which the kabocha grew—seemed to morph terrifyingly into an all-engulfing, speckled pattern stretching seamlessly from heaven to earth, threatening to swallow her up within it” (G. Williams, “Infinite Nature: On Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins,” in Yayoi Kusama: Pumpkins, Victoria Miro, 2014, np). The painted pumpkin is integral to Kusama’s conception of self and, centered around her identity, functions as the artist's alter ego.
“Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep.” Yayoi Kusama
Kusama has since her early childhood weaponized her artistic production in defense against her hallucinations, waging a lonely battle against the psychosis she has suffered since childhood. While her pumpkins operate as autobiographical symbols, Infinity Nets evolves from a different hallucinosis: “I would cover the canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, or the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand toward infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. I work one morning and found the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled onto and into the skin of my hands” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, Louisiana Museum of Art, 2015, pp. 11-12). Kusama captures this all-consuming experience in her paintings, utilizing the space of the canvas to suggest a portal into a more expansive universe. A similar framing device is employed by Gustav Klimt in his Fir Forest I of 1901, where he crops a discrete section of a coniferous forest, severing tree trunks vertically at the edges of the canvas to denote a much grander scene. More than a merging of motifs and bridging of her New York and Japanese periods of production, INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ) recollects and engages with the deepest aspects of her psychology. Meditating on and resisting these two motifs for more than eight decades, Kusama finally unites the two together in the frenzied burst of therapeutic artistic energy demonstrated in the present lot.
In INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ), Kusama reinterprets her famous pumpkin motif, derived from the appearance of the typical kabocha pumpkin native to Japan, across a spatial plane adopted from her Infinity Nets, expanding the black-on-yellow pattern out into an infinite arrangement in space. The definitive statement from her New York period collides with her symbol of Japanese identity, evincing the bipartite essence of Kusama’s practice in which she amalgamates Eastern and Western influences. INFINITY-DOTS (ENNZ) offers Kusama a solution to her attempts at capturing the all-consuming experience she first had with pumpkins, where they engulfed her entire world. No matter how large she fabricated her Pumpkin sculptures, the inherent integrity of the form limited the scope of her speckled pattern to the surface of the work, restraining her ability to express infinity. Merging this motif with the Infinity Nets allows her to flatten the Kabocha pattern in a way that denies a beginning or an end, the dots pervading across and beyond the canvas to fully immerse the viewer. No longer contained by the outlines of the pumpkin form, Kusama’s trademark pattern can expand across every surface, an effect similar to that achieved by the artist in her 1991 Mirror Room (Pumpkin).
Describing her teenage pumpkin fixation, Kusama writes how she would wake before dawn every day to “confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating [her] mind entirely upon the form before [her].” She continues: “Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep” (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2013, pg. 75). Seventy years later, Kusama remains just as committed, articulating her internal universe in a rapturous visual form whose expansive presence immerses the viewer within the artist’s grand enduring vision.