Infinity Nets

Yayoi Kusama began painting “Infinity Nets,” the artist’s longest-running series, after moving to New York City in 1958. For Kusama, these abstract works covered in repeated, curved brushstrokes are an essential form of art therapy, inspired in part by her hallucinatory visions. “My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them,” she once explained. “They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.” In pursuit of this infinite abyss, Kusama has even painted her “Infinity Nets” in uninterrupted sessions of 40 to 50 hours. In 2014, this influential series set records in the art market. Her monochromatic “Infinity Net” White No. 28 (1960) was sold at auction for $7.1 million, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living female artist.