“I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality and form. My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues. I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child.”
—Yayoi Kusama
Considered Japan’s most successful living artist, it is the humble pumpkin that has become a symbol of Yayoi Kusama’s worldwide acclaim. Kusama’s obsession with the pumpkin originates from her childhood, when the artist started to experience vivid hallucinations of flowers, polka dots, mushrooms, pumpkins, and other fruits and vegetables. While Kusama was frightened by the floral figures and dots fabricated by her mental projections, she found solace and reassurance in pumpkins. At the age of 17, she made her public pumpkin debut with Kabocha (Pumpkin), a traditional Nihonga-style painting made in accordance with Japanese artistic conventions, techniques, and materials. After these inceptive artistic attempts, the pumpkin motif disappeared from Kusama’s oeuvre for decades, to then resurge in the 1970s and 1980s, following a period in which the artist focused on performance art. Her interest in pumpkins grew in the 1990s, when the motif was included in the artist’s interactive installations known as Infinity Mirror Rooms. A more recent infinity room, titled All the Eternal Love I Have for Pumpkins (2016), enabled visitors to be fully immersed in Kusama’s pumpkin-filled visions, epitomising the artist’s adoration of her favourite motif.
“Pumpkins talk to me. Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins. Giving off an aura of my sacred mental state. They embody a base for the joy of living, a living shared by all humankind on the earth. It is for the pumpkins that I keep going.”
—Yayoi Kusama
Executed in 2000, the present work showcases Yayoi Kusama’s ongoing fascination with the pumpkin and monochromatic polka dots. Iconic to the artist’s practice, the multiplicity of the dark black dots against the vibrantly flattened yellow pumpkin result in a mesmerising and hallucinatory surface, heightened by the surrounding web of geometrical black lines. A remarkable example that is archetypal of Kusama’s pumpkin motif, Pumpkin 2000 (Yellow) masterfully encapsulates the artist’s obsessional focus on accumulation, repetition, and the infinite through the combination of the three pillars that define her artistic practice – dots, nets, and the pumpkin.
“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
Functioning as both an allegory and a form of self-portraiture, Kusama’s pumpkins are an embodiment of optimism, serenity, and joy, and are celebrated as one of the most loved and instantly recognisable icons in contemporary art. Each of Kusama’s pumpkins radiate messages of hope, peace and love to all corners of the world, while also symbolising the artist’s triumphant status as an international sensation.