White Net Painting

As a student in Japan in the 1950s, Yayoi Kusama felt constrained by the conservative atmosphere and painting style of her art school, and became intrigued by the art being produced in the United States. She corresponded with painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and in 1958 relocated to New York City, where she became a major figure in the Pop and Minimalist movements of the era, creating paintings and sculpture, prints, films, as well as performance and installation works.

White Net Painting was among her first forays into what later became known as Infinity Nets, meticulously rendered accumulations of obsessively repeated strokes that recreate visual hallucinations that the artist has experienced since childhood. Of these works, Kusama has said “I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”

This work may originally have been a part of a 33-foot white infinity net canvas shown in her solo exhibition at the Stephen Radich Gallery in New York in May 1961.