Yayoi Kusama A Pumpkin RB-B For Sale

About this work

Yayoi Kusama's pumpkin imagery has become one of the most beloved and recognized bodies of work in contemporary art. Beginning in the 1990s — when she first encountered the subject during a residency in Benesse Art Site Naoshima — the pumpkin has served as Kusama's primary vehicle for her dot-and-net obsession: the rounded, segmented surface of the gourd providing ideal terrain for the all-over polka dot patterning that defines her mature practice. Kusama has described feeling a particular affinity for the pumpkin's humble grotesqueness — its bumpy, imperfect form, its grounded earthiness, its capacity to absorb her obsessive patterning without losing its essential identity. This work participates in a body of imagery that spans painting, sculpture, installation, and print, each pumpkin a further iteration in an ongoing conversation between the artist's inner world and this most unassuming of natural forms.