Infinity Nets AB

1994

Infinity Nets AB, 1994. Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, 1929-). Etching; image: 17.8 x 11.6 cm (7 x 4 9/16 in.); sheet: 24.8 x 17.9 cm (9 3/4 x 7 1/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Lewis J. Greenwald 2022.127 Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets AB is part of a large body of work in which the artist plays with the notion of infinite repetition and infinite space. Using an allover mark-making method, she collapses the distinction between figure and ground, giving equal weight to both the lines, and the holes within them. Starting in the late 1950s, Kusama employed this type of mark-making as a form of catharsis, and continued with the series through the 1990s, when this etching was made. Kusama’s two-dimensional “Infinity Nets” works went on to inspire the obsessive, sometimes hallucinatory qualities in the artist’s three-dimensional, interactive works for which she is best known.