Yayoi Kusama // Nets 37, 1998

  • Yayoi Kusama, Nets 37, 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 41 × 32.1 cm. A late Infinity Net painting showing Kusama’s mature use of repetition, obsession, and infinity.
    Nets 37, 1998
    Acrylic on canvas, 41 × 32.1 cm (16 1/8 × 12 5/8 in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only.
     
    Painted in 1998, Nets 37 returns to one of Kusama’s most defining motifs: the Infinity Net. First developed in New York during the late 1950s, these works established her reputation within the international avant-garde and marked her as a pioneer of postwar abstraction. Nearly four decades later, Kusama revisited the series with a renewed clarity, infusing the same obsessive repetition with the confidence of her mature style.
     
    The intimate scale of Nets 37 invites close viewing, emphasising the labour-intensive accumulation of marks that dissolve the boundaries between figure and ground. The painting illustrates how Kusama’s lifelong themes, obsession, infinity, and self-dissolution, remained central throughout her career, yet were constantly reinterpreted through new contexts and decades.

  • “My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them.”

     – Yayoi Kusama

    By the late 1990s, Kusama had achieved global recognition, with major exhibitions and retrospectives confirming her position as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art. Works such as Nets 37 demonstrated her ability to continually reinvent her visual language without losing its coherence, adapting the Infinity Net to new scales, palettes, and contexts. What had begun in the 1950s as a radical departure from both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism had, by this point, matured into a signature style that remained both instantly recognisable and endlessly adaptable.