Infinity Nets (76) by Yayoi Kusama is among the purest expressions of the all-over method she developed in New York in the late 1950s — a red network of irregular cells laid over a pale grey-white ground, edge to edge, no focal point, no hierarchy, the pattern pressing against every border as though it continues beyond the paper. The unit here is not the dot but the line — thin red strokes forming irregular polygons that tile the entire image in a structure closer to cracked earth or cellular biology than to conventional mark-making. Each cell is distinct, slightly different in size and shape from its neighbours, yet the overall field reads as completely uniform, the eye unable to find a point of entry or rest.

This is the quality Kusama was after from the beginning — an image that resists the viewer's attempt to locate themselves within it. Kusama began the Infinity Nets in 1958, shortly after arriving in New York from Japan. Working on canvases that were sometimes several metres across, she painted arc after arc in a single colour against a monochrome ground, the repetition sustained across weeks and months of work.

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