Infinity-Nets DHPP

This motif, consisting of small clustered cells, first appeared in Kusama’s works as early as 1948. Following the artist’s arrival in the United States, it took the form of a grid covering the entire pictorial surface in the Infinity Nets. In 1959, 18 months after her arrival in New York, Kusama held her first solo exhibition on American soil at the Brata Gallery, known for representing the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. For this exhibition, Kusama presented five immense Infinity Nets consisting of white cells on a white background. Commenting on them, Sir Herbert Read wrote that they were “without beginning, without end, without form, without definition; [these early paintings] seemed to actualise the infinity of space.” In this respect, these canvases mark a break in the artist’s oeuvre and can, to a certain extent, be likened to the ‘all-over’ style of the Abstract Expressionists. Their monumental scale also makes a direct reference to the works of this same New York School. The connection between Kusama’s painting and that of artists such as Jackson Pollock, whose fame was immense at the time, contributed to her rapid critical recognition within the New York art scene of the period.

Whilst benefiting from this affiliation, Kusama nevertheless challenges the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism, and her canvases embody an entirely different vision. Her painstakingly repeated gesture stands in opposition to any spontaneous sentimentality associated with the New York School. For her, this gesture is, on the contrary, an ‘exact and monotonous repetition, akin to the mechanism of a machine’. American Minimalist artists, including Donald Judd and Frank Stella, went so far as to see in this mechanical gesture an attempt to erase the artist—a process tending towards the pure form they sought to achieve in their own practices.

That, however, is not the aim of the Infinity Nets. Whilst their critical association with these Western art movements, which were in vogue in the 1960s, ensured the artist rapid and international recognition, the Infinity Nets are nonetheless unique and unclassifiable. Donald Judd wrote of Kusama’s practice: ‘The expression transcends the question of whether it is Eastern or American […] Although it has something of both, and certainly of Americans such as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is by no means a synthesis and remains entirely independent’. Far from obscuring the artist’s personality, these lace-like networks—initially painted with the textured quality of the ‘in pasto’ technique—are in fact directly derived from Kusama’s deeply personal visions. They would become one of her signature motifs, which she would repeat obsessively over the decades across numerous series, ranging from monochrome to the artist’s characteristic vibrant palette, with each canvas distinguished by a title following a chronological system of numbers or letters.