Infinity

“As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room.” Yayoi Kusama.

Kusama grew up as a child in a seed nursery among large fields of flowers, but it was the Pacific Ocean she saw during her first flight to the USA in 1957 that inspired her well-known Infinity Net paintings. In this painting series, the canvases are obsessively covered in looping arcs, each painted in a single rapid gesture, creating an expressionist pattern of nets and connected dots. The freedom of the brushwork contrasts with its reiteration, preventing us from identifying the beginning or the end of this universe without hierarchies, whose dimensions gradually increased in Kusama’s oeuvre until viewers found themselves engulfed in the infinity of her installations.