Listen to
Doryun Chong:
Kusama made some of her Infinity Net paintings, including this one, by painting on a canvas laid flat over a large table. Sometimes, she also propped larger pieces against the wall in her New York studio and worked standing on a stepladder.
As you look at the painting, titled No. H. Red, imagine the repetitive movements of Kusama’s hand as she worked on the entire surface. Envision how she developed textures by varying the thickness of the paint. With looping brushwork, Kusama created an intricate lace-like red pattern on a dark background. If you shift your focus to the negative spaces between the individual loops that form the ‘net’, the black background starts to emerge. It appears like a field of tiny dots. With this inverse relationship, you can see how the net and the dots are interconnected. To Kusama, the interrelationship between the dots and the net represents the boundless universe and our position within it.
Painting can be a physically demanding process, but Kusama was obsessed with creating. Sometimes, she painted continuously for three or four days without sleeping. In addition to losing her sense of time, Kusama’s connection to reality frayed. She recalled waking up one day to find her infinity nets on the windows of her studio. As she reached out to touch them, the net appeared to crawl onto her hands. These hallucinations led to repeated hospitalisations.
Enveloped by the nets of her own creation, Kusama’s work mirrors her experience of reality. She once shared: ‘I gradually feel myself under the spell of the accumulation and repetition in my ‘nets’ which expand beyond myself, and over the limited space of canvas covering the floor, desks and everywhere; all of the universe which is actually visible.
Narrator:
No. H. Red is an oil painting on canvas created by Yayoi Kusama in 1961. The work is 157 centimetres high and 142 centimetres wide.
From a distance, the painting appears to be a sheer red surface. Upon closer inspection, one sees that the work consists of red lines densely painted in circular strokes over a black background, creating an abstract weaving pattern representative of Kusama’s Infinity Net series . The lines vary in shade from deep red to yellow-orange. The black paint from the background is visible from small gaps between the lines and resemble thousands of dots spread across the painting. These dots vary in shape and size. Some are narrow like long grains of rice, while others look more like tiny broken chips. The dots also come in slightly different shades that range from black to dark brown to muddy yellow, introducing a sense of motion that seems to undulate throughout the canvas.