Exceptional Works: Yayoi Kusama

Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023

Bronze and urethane paint 136 × 221 × 58½ inches
 345.4 × 561.3 × 148.6 cm

“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

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position in recent art history. Since her early assimilation of pop art and minimalism in the 1960s, she has created a highly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Since the 1950s, Kusama has repeatedly used flowers and plants as motifs in her work, inspired by her fascination with the natural world.  Presented on the occasion of Art Basel Unlimited 2024, Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (2023) is an iconic example of Kusama’s sculpture, embodying the themes and forms at the heart of her practice.

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart debuted in the artist’s acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. A monumental sculptural form, it is related to a group of large-scale pumpkin works made in bronze—though here the pumpkin’s normally spherical shape is transfigured into an undulating surface, as if topologically morphed or stretched.

The work’s installation in the round encourages ambulatory engagement, as viewers can observe the sculpture from many different angles while navigating around its folds and curves. Its appearance shifts from every new vantage point, offering an extremely dynamic experience of space and form. This work demonstrates the most recent evolution of the pumpkin as a sculptural form in Kusama’s work.

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, the artist’s second solo exhibition at Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, 1984. Image: © Estate of Shigeo Anzaï, courtesy Zeit-Foto

Installation view, Mirror Room (Pumpkin), 1991, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2019. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro

Installation view, Dancing Pumpkin (2020), Kusama: Cosmic Nature, New York Botanical Garden, 2021

Installation view, Pumpkin (2022), Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2022

 

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

Kusama first encountered pumpkins at her family’s plant nursery, where she saw one growing in a field of zinnias. While pumpkin shapes have appeared in Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, the form gained central importance in her oeuvre from the 1980s onward. Its prominence was cemented by one of the artist’s first open-air sculptures, Pumpkin (1994). Created as a large-scale public commission for the Benesse Art Site on Naoshima Island in Japan, Pumpkin is positioned at the end of a pier stretching into the ocean and is now one of Kusama’s best-known works.

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

“The first time I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school.... It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form ... the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness ... and its solid spiritual balance.”

—Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, 2002

Installation view, Yayoi Kusama, Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

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

Standing more than eleven feet tall, Aspiring to Pumpkin's Love, the Love in My Heart is covered with vertical “stripes” of Kusama’s characteristic dots, a motif that dates back to her childhood drawings of flowers at her parents’ seed nurseries that show 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

Yayoi Kusama standing next to Pumpkin (1994) during her visit for the opening reception of the Out of Bounds exhibition, Naoshima, Japan, September 1994.

 

In July, the Serpentine Galleries in London will unveil a new large-scale outdoor work titled Pumpkin (2024). This installation will mark a return to the Serpentine for Kusama, who presented her first UK retrospective there in 2000. In December 2024, the largest-ever retrospective exhibition of Kusama’s work in Australia will open at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Major current and recent exhibitions include an extensive retrospective titled Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao and M+, Hong Kong, and now on view at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto through September 2024. Yayoi Kusama: My Soul Blooms Forever, the largest outdoor exhibition of its kind in the Gulf region, concluded its run at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, in March 2023.

Installation views, Yayoi Kusama, Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023

Yayoi Kusama, Kusama with Pumpkin, Aichi Triennale, 2010  All artworks © YAYOI KUSAMA

David Zwirner at Art Basel Unlimited