“I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely upon the form before me. Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted even having to take time to sleep”

—Yayoi Kusama

It was during her childhood visit to a seed nursery near her home in Matsumoto, Japan, that Yayoi Kusama first encountered a pumpkin. Afflicted with visual and auditory hallucinations, Kusama vividly recalls the pumpkin speaking to her younger self from the vine. Drawn to its "humorous form" and "warm feeling," Kusama has since developed a lifelong fascination with the humble fruit.

After her first attempt at depicting this subject matter in the traditional Japanese Nihonga style in 1946, Kusama continued to paint pumpkins diligently during her four-year-study at the Kyoto Senior High School of Art. Despite a temporary hiatus from the pumpkin after her relocation to New York in 1958, Kusama revisited her beloved motif in the 1970s, reimagining it in various mediums and scales in the subsequent decades.

 Yayoi Kusama reading her poem “On Pumpkins”

Created in 1984, Pumpkin brings together three prominent motifs in Kusama’s oeuvre – the pumpkin, polka dot, and infinity net. Set against an expansive background of net-like patterns that directly evoke her Infinity Net series, the vivid yellow pumpkin is covered with polka dots of alternating sizes. In delineating its slightly elongated, curvaceous shape, Kusama elevates the object through her at once graceful and whimsical treatment.

In addition to these recurring motifs, Kusama further explores the central theme of repetition in Pumpkin through her chosen medium of screenprint. As she slowly builds up the form of the pumpkin through the accumulative use of polka dots, the near-meditative practice allows the artist to combat and transcend her hallucinatory mental illness. Simultaneously advancing and receding, the rhythmic dynamism of the dots imbues the pumpkin with an animated quality, creating a dazzling effect that transports the viewer into Kusama’s fantastical world.