Attracted to the social freedom and teeming postwar art scene in the United States, Kusama left Japan and moved to New York City in 1958. Soon thereafter, she began producing her Infinity Nets series of paintings, including No. F., in which she played with the notion of infinite repetition and infinite space. While the expansive white of her canvas presaged the monochromes of the Minimalists, her use of thick, intricately webbed impasto hints at something more personal and obsessive. In fact, her nets can be seen as a material form of the patterns that Kusama experiences in hallucinations, a condition that has afflicted her since childhood.
Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, April 19 - August 13, 2017
Gallery label from 2023
Attracted to the social freedoms promised by the teeming postwar art scene in the United States, Kusama left Japan and moved to New York in 1958. Soon she began producing her series Infinity Nets, including No. F., in which she played with the idea of infinite repetition and infinite space. Marrying serial repetition with an allover painting method, the artist’s works collapse the distinction between figure and ground, giving equal weight to the interlocking brushstrokes and the spaces between them. The process of making these paintings was a form of catharsis for the artist, who said, “Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.”
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Yayoi Kusama
Japanese, born 1929 112 works onlineA vital part of New York’s avant-garde art scene from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Yayoi Kusama developed a distinctive style utilizing approaches associated with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, Feminist art, and Institutional Critique—but she always defined herself in her own terms.
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Allover painting
An approach to painting that emerged with the Abstract Expressionists , in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance.
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Impasto
An Italian word for “mixture,” used to describe a painting technique wherein paint is thickly laid on a surface, so that brushstrokes or palette knife marks are visible.
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