Yayoi Kusama // Net in Blue, 1987

  • Yayoi Kusama, Net in Blue, 1987. Acrylic on canvas, 45.5 × 38 cm. A late Infinity Net painting, reflecting Kusama’s obsession with repetition, accumulation, and infinity.
    Net in Blue, 1987
    Acrylic on canvas, 45.5 × 38 cm (17 7/8 × 15 in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only.
    Painted in 1987, Net in Blue revisits one of Kusama’s most important and career-defining motifs: the Infinity Net. First developed in New York during the late 1950s, the net paintings established her reputation as a pioneering voice in postwar abstraction and aligned her with the movements of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism while remaining entirely her own.
     
    By the late 1980s, Kusama had returned to the motif with renewed intensity, producing canvases that combined the repetitive mark-making of her early practice with the clarity and confidence of her mature style. In Net in Blue, the delicate mesh of painted forms appears both endless and meditative, transforming the canvas into a field of rhythm and infinity.

  • "My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe.”

     – Yayoi Kusama

    This work demonstrates how Kusama’s central themes, obsession, accumulation, and the dissolution of self into pattern, remained the foundation of her practice across decades. While her materials, formats, and subjects shifted over time, the underlying drive to translate psychological experience into visual rhythm persisted. In Net in Blue, the dense lattice of marks creates both a sense of confinement and liberation, echoing the paradox at the heart of her art: the simultaneous erasure of individuality and the pursuit of infinity. The blue tonality amplifies this effect, softening the intensity of the pattern while reinforcing its meditative, immersive quality. The canvas becomes a site of contemplation, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in the endless weave of the net, just as Kusama herself sought both escape and expression through repetition.