Yayoi Kusama // Pumpkin, 1980

  • Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 1980. Acrylic, graphite, and fabric collage on canvas, 130.5 × 162.6 cm. A monumental work that reintroduces Kusama’s pumpkin motif as a central theme in her mature practice.
    Pumpkin, 1980
    Acrylic, graphite and fabric collage on canvas, 130.5 × 162.6 cm (51 3/8 × 64 in.)
    © Yayoi Kusama. Image reproduced for educational and informational purposes only. 
     
    Painted in 1980, Pumpkin represents Kusama’s embrace of one of her most iconic and enduring motifs. The pumpkin had first appeared in her work in the late 1940s, but during the 1980s it re-emerged as a central subject, fusing personal memory with broader symbolic resonance. Here, Kusama combines acrylic, graphite, and fabric collage to heighten the textural and tactile qualities of the canvas, transforming the humble vegetable into a monumental object of contemplation.
     
    The pumpkin, for Kusama, is both autobiographical and universal: she has described it as a source of comfort since childhood, a form that is simultaneously humorous, organic, and resilient. By the early 1980s, these works helped consolidate her transition from the avant-garde notoriety of the 1960s to the deeply personal visual vocabulary that would shape her subsequent decades.

  • “I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality.”

     – Yayoi Kusama

    This Pumpkin not only embodies Kusama’s obsessive repetition and rhythmic surface patterning, but also demonstrates how her chosen motifs could serve as both intimate symbols and widely recognisable emblems of her practice.