Yayoi Kusama Infinity Net Prints For Sale

Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Nets are the body of work that first announced her to the New York art world, debuting at the Brata Gallery, an artist-run co-operative on East 10th Street, in October 1959. The show consisted of five enormous white canvases covered edge to edge in dense, obsessively repeated arcs of paint, a pattern Kusama has described as a direct translation of the hallucinations that had followed her since childhood. Among the visitors was a then-unknown critic named Donald Judd, who wrote in praise of the exhibition and bought one of the paintings himself for $200, paid off in four instalments. Judd called Kusama "an original painter," and the friendship that followed became one of the most significant artistic relationships of her early New York years. Within four years of that debut, Kusama had already begun translating the Net motif into print, with an early screenprint published in 1963 by the Gendai-Hanga Center in Tokyo, establishing a printmaking practice that has continued alongside her paintings ever since.

The nets themselves have shifted continually across six decades without losing their essential character: a single repeated mark, applied with total consistency, until it dissolves the distinction between figure and background entirely. Early net paintings were largely monochrome, built from white or off-white arcs laid over a darker ground, while later prints introduced colour into the same obsessive structure, from saturated reds to metallic golds pressed against black. Kusama has spoken of the nets outgrowing the canvas itself, spreading in her mind across walls, ceilings and eventually the universe, and that same sense of accumulation without end defines every net print regardless of scale or palette. Where her pumpkins offer a recognisable, almost approachable subject, the Infinity Nets are Kusama at her most abstract and most psychologically direct, the clearest print record of the visual language that has driven her entire practice.

Kusama's net prints have been produced across a wide range of studios and publishers over the decades, reflecting how central the motif has remained to her practice at every stage of her career. Her Infinity Nets (for Parkett no. 59), published in 2000, was printed onto mirrored glass by Okabe Print Editions in Tokyo, while other net editions from the same period were published through Toki-no-Wasuremono and printed by specialist studios including Ryoichi Ishida's workshop, each collaboration translating the density of Kusama's mark-making into a different print surface and technique. Edition sizes for net prints have varied considerably by release, from tightly limited runs of 40 to larger editions closer to 100, and each is signed, numbered and dated by Kusama herself.

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