No. F

Attracted to the social freedom and teeming postwar art scene in the United States, Kusama left Japan and moved to New York City in 1958. Soon thereafter, she began producing her Infinity Nets series of paintings, including No. F., in which she played with the notion of infinite repetition and infinite space. Combining her developing strategy of serial repetition with an allover painting method, the works collapse the distinction between figure and ground, giving equal weight to both the brushstrokes and the holes within them. Psychologically, the process of making these paintings was a form of catharsis for the artist, who sought to obliterate her fears and even herself through the act of repetition.

Attracted to the social freedom and teeming postwar art scene in the United States, Kusama left Japan and moved to New York City in 1958. Soon thereafter, she began producing her Infinity Nets series of paintings, including No. F., in which she played with the notion of infinite repetition and infinite space. While the expansive white of her canvas presaged the monochromes of the Minimalists, her use of thick, intricately webbed impasto hints at something more personal and obsessive. In fact, her nets can be seen as a material form of the patterns that Kusama experiences in hallucinations, a condition that has afflicted her since childhood.

Credit: Sid R. Bass Fund