“It seems pumpkins do not inspire much respect, but I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness.”
— Yayoi Kusama
This trio of sculptural pumpkins by Yayoi Kusama from 1998 features her signature polka-dot motif, realised in vibrant red, yellow, and green hues. Each pumpkin’s bulbous form is textured with uniform circular indentations, creating a rhythmic interplay of light and shadow across their surfaces. Displayed on the oringal ceramic tile bases, the sculptures draw viewers into Kusama’s boundless imaginative world, where these humble pumpkins become vessels of her lifelong fascination and obsession.
“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
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. 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.” 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”.