Yayoi Kusama’s ‘net’ paintings developed out of her attempt to replicate the rippling effect of waves viewed below her on her first flight from Japan to the United States in 1957. Using a restricted palette, one colour is painted in tight repetitive loops to form undulating nets over a monochromatic ground, often as simple as one shade of white on another.

Unlike the aggressive mark-making of Abstract Expressionism or the lack of gesture characterising Minimalism, the leading art movements in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Kusama’s ‘net’ paintings bear the paradoxical trace of immense labour consisting of the accumulation of tiny gestures. The artist has also noted visual correspondences between these paintings and the hallucinations of repeating patterns — perceived as a veil of dots — she experienced as a child. Through infinitesimal variations in the whiteness of the paint, Kusama creates a surface that undulates and vibrates, dissolving distinctions between positive and negative space and implying the idea of infinity through rhythmical repetition.

Optically dazzling, these paintings are also remarkable for their scale, sometimes covering entire walls and enveloping viewers in a way that foreshadowed the artist’s turn to installation in the mid 1960s. The ‘net’ paintings have remained a constant in Kusama’s practice for nearly seven decades.