Yayoi Kusama / Japan b.1929 / Infinity nets 2000 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 162 x 130cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art / Purchased 2001 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899–1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

Yayoi Kusama
Infinity nets 2000

Not Currently on Display

The painting Infinity nets 2000, sees Kusama revisit iconographic aspects of the large white paintings she executed from 1958 to the late 1960s, and is an excellent example of her net paintings. The characteristic obsessive repetition of the net and/or dot, forms an important basis for much of Kusama’s work. The variations and inventions that she is able to achieve through these forms are immense. Kusama describes developing the dot and the net motif as beginning at a very early age when she began to experience hallucinatory episodes.

In Infinity nets 2000 the ‘dots’ emerge as spaces delineated by the painting of the net. Like the early net paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, this work features a net that is gestural in its execution. The demarcation between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ spaces remains fluid, so that when looking at the painting the eye is led to move between looking at an image of a net to looking at a surface that consists of dots. The metaphor embedded in this oscillation extends to the contemplation of the notion of ‘infinity’. Kusama often uses the word ‘infinity’ in the titles of her works; she gives infinity a form through repetition.

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant artists to emerge from Asia in the postwar period. Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Japan in 1929 and was the youngest of four children. By 1941, as a twelve-year-old child, she had begun to notate and paint hallucinations, which she experienced as veils of dots.

During the early 1950s, Kusama recognised that the visual and aural hallucinations she had experienced for a decade were symptomatic of a condition known as ‘rijin’sho’ (depersonalisation syndrome). Kusama continues to experience these hallucinations to this day.

As an adult Kusama developed a vibrant visual iconography composed of dots, often transposed as nets or auras, that has become the familiar visual vocabulary dominating her artistic practice. Kusama moved to New York in 1955, where she lived and worked until 1972, before returning to Japan. Kusama’s practice embraces drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, performance, fashion, tabloid publishing, filmmaking, installation, novels, poetry and music.