“Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood. They speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”
—Yayoi Kusama

Without doubt one of the most immediately recognisable motifs in contemporary art, the polka-dot covered pumpkin sits at the very heart of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s incredible 70-year practice, appearing across her work in paintings, sculpture, and immersive installations. Profoundly personal, Kusama’s affinity with the misshapen gourd is rooted deeply in the artist’s biography and is closely tied to the patterns of infinite repetition and accumulation that best define her practice. Beautifully realised here in undulating bronze, the exceptional free-standing sculpture captures the jovial vitality of the pumpkin, Kusama’s meticulously executed polka-dot design enlivening its voluptuously curved surface and acknowledging its esteemed place in her creative universe. So deeply enmeshed with Kusma’s biography and practice, the pumpkin is utterly synonymous with the artist herself, employed both as a universally recognised signature and a richly rewarding mode of self-representation that is most readily evoked in the freestanding sculptures.

 

Standing at just over a metre high, Pumpkin (M) is a rare domestically scaled example of Kusama’s bronze pumpkins embodying the ‘fertile self-enclosure and radical openness to others’ that best defines her sculptural practice and installations.ⁱ Following the ungainly curves and swollen form of the gourd itself, Kusama’s idiosyncratic polka-dot design flows in waves across its pronounced contours, recalling the bold, graphic qualities of Pop’s serial approach to everyday consumer items as well as the sophisticated geometries and emphasis on pattern and visual sensation explored in Op Art. Working with this yielding organic form, Kusama moves beyond naturalistic representation, animating each of these three-dimensional pieces with a vitality and personality all of their own.

Roots of Kusama’s Pumpkins

 

Growing up on her family’s seed farm in Matsumoto, Kusama was surrounded by the natural world, an environment that directly informed the severe auditory and visual hallucinations that the artist first began to suffer as a child. However, where her recollections of other animated plants and accumulating talking flowers take on more terrifying dimensions that the artist would compulsively return to in her phallic soft sculpture installations, Infinity Nets, and mirrored environments, the pumpkin provided an altogether more comforting vision. As the artist recalls, ‘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 […] It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form.’ⁱⁱ Since then, the artist has gone to lengths to describe the joy and comfort that the humble and humorously shaped squash has provided over the years and her work continues to celebrate them and the unassuming joie de vivre that they embody.

 

Among the earliest subjects treated by the burgeoning artist, Kusama’s first depictions of pumpkins date from the 1940s, following her training at the Kyoto City Senior High School of Art in the traditional Nihonga style of painting. Kusama would later describe the meditative effect of this practice, repeatedly returning to the kabocha and capturing their unique charm in a manner that anticipates the compulsive repetitiousness of her later Infinity Nets and mirrored environments. Tellingly, the pumpkins made their presence felt in these performances too, forming an integral part of the presentation Mirror Room (Pumpkin) in the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 iteration of La Biennale di Venezia, where the artist, costumed in polka dots, dispensed smaller handheld pumpkins to visitors. The room - like the pumpkins and the artist herself - was covered in black polka dots, recalling her Happenings in 1960s New York and their emphasis on modes of ‘self-obliteration’.

 

For Kusama accumulation and obliteration are utterly entwined, the auditory and visual hallucinations that she first experienced in childhood provoking a radical sense of dissolution between the self and the universe. As the artist describes, ‘One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up […] I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space.’ⁱⁱⁱ Acting as both the materialisation of these visions and a therapeutic response to them, in her repetitive, accumulating nets, mirrored environments, and polka dots Kusama translated these hallucinations and her fear of them into her work, embracing the self-obliteration that they promised. Although her pumpkins have taken many forms, colours, and sizes over the decades, they are always covered in her signature polka-dot pattern, Kusama distilling her internal struggles into a colourful and comforting form, restoring herself to equilibrium and bringing joy to countless viewers in the radiant celebration of life and energy that it embodies.

 

Although Kusama first started rendering large-scale pumpkins in fibreglass in the 1990s, it is with these later stunningly reflective bronze pieces Kusama approaches the immersive, interactive experiences of her mirrored environments. Created in 2016 for the artist’s installation Yayoi Kusama: Sculptures, Paintings & Mirror Rooms with Victoria Miro in London, the lustrous, mirror-polished Pumpkin (M) is amongst the first created by the artist, with other examples from the same edition having since been included in some of Kusama’s most significant exhibitions of recent years, including those held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and PHI Foundation, Québec. Examples of Kusama’s monumental open-air pumpkin sculptures continue to move and enchant viewers, as was seen most famously in the international reaction to the typhoon damage sustained by the first and most beloved of these pieces, originally installed at the Benesse Art Site on Naoshima Island. Most recently, Kusama unveiled her tallest bronze sculpture to date this year, the 6-metre-high Pumpkin now installed in Kensington Gardens, London. A stunning example of the artist’s most beloved and deeply personal motif, Pumpkin (M) speaks to Kusama’s genuine love for the gourd, and her desire to share this joy with her viewers.

 

Yayoi Kusama reading her poem ‘Pumpkins’

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• One of the most prominent and prolific artists working today, Yayoi Kusama’s practice blends painting, installation, sculpture, and performance to powerful effect.

• Arguably her most iconic motif, the pumpkin has appeared in various different formats in Kusama’s career, including paintings, colossal outdoor sculptures and domestic-scaled ceramics, and her celebrated mirrored environments.

• Invited to be the first woman artist to represent the Japanese Pavilion in the 1993 La Biennale di Venezia, Kusama chose to centralise the pumpkin, constructing a vast mirrored room in an immersive installation of black and yellow polka dots. More recently in London, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins was presented at Victoria Miro, before touring major institutions in the United States including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC and the Broad, Los Angeles, amongst others between 2017 and 2019.

 

 

ⁱ Leslie Camhi, 'Large Sculpture', in Louise Neri and Takaya Goto, eds., Yayoi Kusama, New York, 2012, p. 214.

ⁱⁱ Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net, trans. Ralph McCarthy, London, 2011, p. 75.

ⁱⁱⁱ Yayoi Kusama, quoted in ‘Yayoi Kusama by Grady T. Turner’, Bomb Magazine, 1 January 1999, online.