Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama’s work has revolved around an idiosyncratic set of themes and motifs, to which the ideas of repetition, accumulation and infinity are central. Among her many innovations, Kusama’s ‘Infinity net’ paintings and ‘Infinity room’ installations are among the most celebrated. The ‘net’ paintings caused a critical sensation when first unveiled in the late 1950s. Profoundly influential in the United States as well as internationally, they signalled a point of departure from the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and anticipated later developments in Pop, Minimalism and Concrete art. They have remained a staple of Kusama’s practice with a singular consistency for over 50 years.

The ‘net’ paintings developed out of a small canvas called Pacific Ocean 1958, which the artist produced in an attempt to replicate the effect of the waves she saw rippling below her on her first flight from Japan to the United States. Their palette was restricted, with one colour painted in tight repetitive loops to form undulating nets over a monochromatic ground, often as simple as one shade of white on another. The scale of these early works was also remarkable for the time, sometimes covering entire walls to the point that they appeared like walls themselves, anticipating Kusama’s later and equally innovative installations. Lacking a discernible centre and obeying no known conventions of composition, they proposed painting not as the production of modular, autonomous entities, but as objects within the world — paintings as surface-driven three-dimensional forms.

Unlike the aggressive and fast mark-making of Abstract Expressionism or the erasure of gesture characterising Minimalism, Kusama’s ‘net’ paintings bear the paradoxical trace of an immense labour consisting of accumulated tiny gestures. Their dazzling optical effects and apparent reference to nothing more than their materials and the process of production was more in keeping with the Concrete art of European artists like Lucio Fontana and the Dutch Nul Group, with whom she would become associated throughout the 1960s. It is possible to see Kusama’s signature polka dots already present in these paintings, as the negative space left between the loops of the netting. The influence of the paintings’ surfaces can also be detected in the undulating fields of Kusama’s soft sculptures, mirror rooms and psychedelic canvases. Dots appear as fluorescent ping-pong balls in Soul under the moon, an infinity room conceived for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘APT2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’.

Kusama’s mirror installation technique was pioneered in Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field 1965, which consisted of four mirrored walls and a mirrored ceiling, infinitely reflecting a mass of spotted protuberances covering the floor. The technique re-emerged as the artist gained access to greater resources in the 1990s, just as installation gained widespread acceptance as a viable artistic form. In the ‘infinity’ works, repetition was achieved not through mark-making, but through light and mirrors, creating the illusion of infinite space within a confined area.

On the one hand, the mirror rooms open Yayoi Kusama’s self-contained, self-focused practice up to the world; on the other, they draw the world into the work. If Kusama’s ‘net’ paintings enveloped the viewer and suggested the possibility of infinite expansion into space, her infinity rooms represented a step towards realising this possibility.