Pumpkin YB-A (2004) by Yayoi Kusama shows a single pumpkin in saturated yellow against a dense black ground — the gourd's ribbed form covered entirely in dots that graduate from smaller at the edges and larger toward the centre, the background itself filled with an cell-like network that extends the mark-making beyond the object and across the entire surface. The pumpkin has been central to Kusama's work since childhood. She grew up in Matsumoto, in the Japanese Alps, where her family ran a plant nursery and seed merchant business, and the vegetable appeared early in her imagination as something stable and grounding — she has described it as possessing a "generous unpretentiousness" that she found calming during a childhood marked by hallucinations and psychological distress.

When Kusama moved to New York in 1958 and began the Infinity Net paintings — vast canvases covered in a single obsessively repeated arc-stroke that she described as an act of self-obliteration — the pumpkin motif connected to a related logic. A recognisable form submitted entirely to the rhythm of the mark, the object at once present and dissolved into pattern.

For more information or to buy Pumpkin YB-A by Yayoi Kusama, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.