Yayoi Kusama // Nets Blue, 1960

  • Yayoi Kusama, Nets Blue, 1960. Oil on board, 51.8 × 41.9 cm. Early Infinity Net composition with white loops on a blue ground.
    Nets Blue, 1960
    Oil on board, 51.8 × 41.9 cm (20 3/8 × 16 ½ in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only. 

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    Painted in 1960, Nets Blue is an early example of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net style, executed in oil on board. Measuring 51.8 × 41.9 cm, the work demonstrates her emerging technique of layering repeated, rhythmic brushstrokes across a monochrome ground. This method laid the foundation for one of her most recognisable and influential visual languages.

     

    Created shortly after Kusama’s arrival in New York, the painting reflects her engagement with contemporary abstraction while maintaining a highly personal and meditative approach to mark-making and surface. This period marked the beginning of her international career, as she developed the Infinity Net paintings that would become central to her artistic legacy.

  • “By translating hallucinations into paintings, I was able to keep myself alive. My nets were proof of my continuing.”

    – Yayoi Kusama

    The composition is built from overlapping loops of white and pale tones against a blue background, creating a continuous mesh-like pattern. This technique, which Kusama called her Infinity Nets, marked a breakthrough in her practice and set her apart from both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The work’s smaller scale suggests it may have served as a study for larger canvases, yet it contains the same obsessive mark-making that defined her most iconic works of the 1960s.