Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkins are central to an oeuvre deeply entrenched in the artist’s childhood memories, a trope that has featured extensively and consistently throughout the artist’s practice. The gourd appeared in the artist’s works as early as in the 1940s, depicted simply in light sketches, during her training in nihonga (“Japanese style painting”) at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. They were formally engrained in her artistic production since the 1980s and 1990s, and her fondness for them has not diminished in the least.

Kusama’s pumpkins rose to global prominence in 1993 during the artist’s participation in the Venice Biennale. The artist presented Mirror Room (Pumpkin), a sprawling mirrored room filled with small pumpkin sculptures, reminiscent of an immense field teeming with its titular vegetable. Painted five years after this, the present Pumpkin is executed in a matured polka dot style, and in Kusama’s signature dual-coloured palette of yellow and jet-black, with a repetitive web pattern in the background of the work, analogous with the endless reflections of Mirror Room (Pumpkin).

For the artist, the pumpkin is also deeply nostalgic, and finds its roots in her childhood: “The first time I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school and went with my grandfather to visit a big seed-harvesting ground…and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head… It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner” (quoted in Infinity Net, Yayoi Kusama (translated by Ralph McCarthy), London, 2011, p. 75). Since its very first introduction into Kusama’s life, and its first forays onto the international art stage, the pumpkin will forever remain the most iconic extension, mascot, and metaphor for the artist herself.