Exceptional Works: Yayoi Kusama

Pumpkin, 2019

“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

Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has been integral in shaping the landscape of international contemporary art and is widely acclaimed as one of the most successful artists in the world. Unmistakable and endlessly inventive, her groundbreaking body of work—which comprises painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and installation—traverses a range of postwar artistic movements while consistently engaging such universal themes as subjectivity, life, death, infinity, and obsession.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, Pumpkin (2019) is an iconic example of Kusama’s sculpture, embodying the themes and forms at the heart of her practice. At three meters tall, the present work is among the largest of the artist’s monumental pumpkin sculptures to date, and is adorned with the artist’s immediately recognizable polka dot pattern.

A flower field in the seed nursery owned by Yayoi Kusama’s family in Matsumoto, Japan

Yayoi Kusama with a pumpkin sculpture, Fukuoka, Japan, 1994

Kusama first encountered pumpkins in her childhood at her family’s plant nursery, where she saw one growing in a field of zinnias. While pumpkin shapes—which the curator Mika Yoshitake notes as “perhaps the most beloved of Kusama’s motifs”—have appeared in Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, this organic form gained central importance in her oeuvre from the 1980s onwards. Its prominence was cemented by one of the artist’s first open-air sculptures, titled Pumpkin (1994), which she created as a large-scale public commission for the Benesse Art Site on Naoshima Island in Japan. Positioned at the end of a pier stretching into the ocean, it is one of the best-known public artworks in the world.

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (1994), Naoshima, Japan, 2022. Photo by Kristen de La Valliere

“I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely on the form before me.”

—Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s portrait of her mother, made when Kusama was ten, 1939 (detail)

Pumpkin (2019) is covered with vertical “stripes” of Kusama’s characteristic dots, a motif that dates back to her childhood drawings of flowers, which showed an interest in vibrant, proliferating forms in nature. A rare portrait made in 1939 is also covered with small dots. As Andrew Solomon writes in Artforum, “By the time she was ten ... she was already doing pencil drawings that featured her distinctive motif of dots and netlike patterns that repeat across an entire surface.”

“Deep in the mountains of Nagano,” Kusama recalls, “I had found my own unique method of expression: ink paintings featuring accumulations of tiny dots and pen drawings of endless and unbroken chains of graded cellular forms or peculiar structures that resembled magnified sections of plant stalks.”

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (1991), Japanese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1993

Kusama first began creating large-scale pumpkins in fiberglass in the 1990s, but it is her more recent reflective bronze works that more closely recall the interactive experience of her mirrored environments. Pumpkin sculptures been included in some of Kusama’s most significant recent exhibitions, including those held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, Australia (2024–2025), and Kensington Gardens, Serpentine Galleries, London, where a colossal new sculpture, Pumpkin (2024), was unveiled.

In October 2025, a major retrospective offering a complete overview of Kusama’s more than seven-decade career will open at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland before traveling to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: Pumpkin, Kensington Gardens, Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom, 2024. Photo by Thierry Bal

"The world of Kusama is magic.... We are ready to suspend our disbelief to enter her universe."

—Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, curators

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 2019  All artworks © YAYOI KUSAMA   

David Zwirner at Art Basel