Yayoi Kusama

When she made this untitled painting in 1978, Kusama was back in Japan and living in the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill. By this time, her activities had expanded significantly to include a commercial enterprise selling clothing, bags, and other products adorned with her signature polka dots and patterns; headline-grabbing, politically-charged street performances; and installations of mirrored rooms that became sites of many of her performances and staged photographs. In this quiet, spray paint on paperboard composition, she expands upon her Infinity Nets series. While she applied paint directly onto the canvas in her earlier Infinity Nets compositions, here she sprayed paint through nets placed in front of the paper, creating undulating patterns evoking such references as mist shrouded mountains or the scaly coils of a snake. As with much of her work, Kusama intended this painting to represent a dissipation of the physical world, of herself, and even of viewers—and an opening onto the infinite.